Students’ Major Projects – A Manipal Model for Experiential Learning

An Engineering graduate, on graduation, is expected to have a skillset to find solutions to problems of the society. Along with the domain specific knowledge, other basic skills that are expected are: Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Planning, Motivation and Enthusiasm, Adaptability and Flexibility, and Ability to Build Relationships. All these mandates engineering education to be experiential, practical, relevant, and up-to-date.

Also, in India, entry into engineering Institutions is highly competitive, due to which at the entry level all the students have a built-in competitive spirit. Keeping this in mind, as an experiment, in 2007 Institute came up with an idea of Major Student Projects, wherein, institute provides infrastructure to build a technical project to compete in an international competition. Such an initiative in 2007 was ‘Formula Manipal’, a student engineering project comprising of a group of undergraduate students aiming to design, conceptualize, fabricate, test and race a single seater, open-wheel Formula Style race car. Since its first competition in 2008, the team has participated in competitions in Italy, UK, Austria, Germany, and Czech Republic.

The success of this has led to initiation of many more student teams. 2008 saw the start of ‘Team Manipal Racing’, off-road racing club to design and fabricate All-Terrain Vehicles according to the rules laid by SAE BAJA. Year 2009, AeroMIT was initiated to design, manufacture, and fly a complex, stable, and portable model aircraft with minimal empty weight, maximum payload carrying capacity; RoboManipal was started with an aim of taking part in robotics competitions like Robocon. Parikshit Student Satellite Team started in 2010 aims to build nanosatellites. Year 2011 was the beginning of ‘Solar Mobil’ with an aim of research & development of solar powered electric vehicle. Project Manas, aiming to develop an ‘autonomous drive system for vehicles’ optimized for Indian road and traffic conditions; Mars Rover Manipal, with a primary objective of building a Rover for University Rover Challenge was established in the year 2014. Thrust MIT – working in the field of rocketry; R.U.G.V.E.D Systems - A.I. Defense Robotics team to develop autonomous UGV for defense forces; DRONAID – building India's fast trauma response & pre-medical healthcare infrastructure combining Drones, AI, and Medical Science; MotoManipal – to build an efficient and environment-friendly Electric Superbike; VISION – developing Augmented Reality headset and AR based applications; S.W.A.R.M – working towards development of Smart Wireless Autonomous Robots are the recent additions to this list.

All these teams are interdisciplinary in nature, having student representation from first to final year. In the process of getting into the team, and selecting the members to the team, students learn to face and conduct interviews. With the team size ranging from 25 to 50, students learn to work in group. By working under tight deadlines, they learn to meet deadlines. By submitting weekly progress report, by presenting weekly progress and scheduling the task, they hone their documentation, presentation, and planning skills. To generate the financial support, they need to sell their idea to possible sponsors. In the process, they learn the marketing, budgeting, and accounting skills. Projects being innovative in nature, these activities have seen many publications and start-ups coming out of these projects. Institution is also seeing more scope for publication and IPs. To enable this, teams have added a research wing. Institution is also framing guidelines for crediting these activities, thus making it part of main stream academic activity.

For details on various Student Projects, please scroll below.