The 2021-22 academic year was an outstanding one for senior projects. Steve Tipton and I, who have co-taught the senior projects course “forever,” define success in senior projects very simply as “a happy customer.” In 2021-22, we had 10 senior projects and 10 happy customers. Thanks to Steve Tipton’s hard work recruiting projects, five of our 10 projects were sponsored by companies: GasTech Engineering LLC (two projects), GD Energy (formerly Gardner Denver), Flight Safety International, and Total Valve. Other projects were sponsored by NASA, Tulsa Public Schools, Dr. William LePage of the TU ME department, and two other projects were sponsored internally by TU.
A tradition of our senior projects program is having the students vote on “Best Project.” This year’s Best Project winner was the NASA Rock Anchoring Device. The winning team started working on their project the summer before their senior year. They chose the most challenging of several projects NASA was sponsoring: to build a purely mechanical device that would anchor to rocks in microgravity without damaging the rocks and with the ability to resist a 10-pound force in any direction. The team built an extremely complex device that performed very well at the June 2022 demonstrations in NASA’s “Neutral Buoyancy Lab.” Dr. Tipton and I were blown away by this team’s utter dedication to their project and their never-say-die attitude!