Young Tinkerers Honored At Motek

A total of 53 students from 20 universities and educational institutions fought for the title “Engineering Newcomer 2016”. The winners were chosen at the award ceremony at Motek in Stuttgart.

The competition is a good opportunity for prospective engineers to show their skills and generate awareness for their projects and themselves. Together with Norelem Normelemente KG, the Federal Working Group for Technical School and the media partner Ke Next, Cadenas launched this competition. Cash prizes and an award that increases career opportunities are guaranteed to the winners.

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“In its third year, the challenge is becoming increasingly popular. We are convinced of the competition and we are happy to have hit a nerve with the budding young engineers and engineers,”says Jürgen Heimbach, Managing Director of Cadenas.

The jury will use the following criteria, among others:

Innovation / creativity:

Is the work a completely new development or an application of known technologies?

Use value / technological benefits / market opportunities:

How is the project implemented in practice? Is it an improvement in the work process and very important: is there a market for the product?

Use of standard parts / purchased parts / cost concept / variability:

Have existing parts been used and has standardization been taken into account?

Fully automatic placement machine wins first place

First place went to Tobias Mayer, Matthias Metz and Sebastian Huber from the Munich Technical School with their fully automatic placement system for dental instruments. The "Next Generation Feeding System" is a handling system for feeding endo instruments via magazine cassettes into the blister machines in order to accomplish small series and to reduce cycle times and to minimize the amount of rejects. The jury awarded the winning team, which had worked on the project for four years, with 2,000 euros.

Unfortunately, Armin Nocker from HTL Jenbach in Austria was not there in person at the award ceremony, but was pleased with the 2nd place and 1000 euros. With his Green Bot, he makes a major contribution to environmental protection: his device recycles unusable printouts and waste from 3D printers and re-uses them as a newly wound wire spool for reuse.

Ulrich Schmid, Philipp Schoch and Timo Schönegg from the Überlingen high school convinced the jury with the development of an automated flight drone to search for missing persons. As a reward, the third place winners could look forward to over 500 euros.

Competition is gaining popularity

Matthias Grywatsch from the Bundesarbeitskreis Fachschule für Technik sums up this year's Engineering Newcomer Challenge: "Regardless of the subject area from which the project came, excellent solutions were created for the respective task." The competition is becoming more and more popular every year and to constantly improve the conditions in order to be able to address many interested parties.

The feedback from the participants showed that one was on the right track: "The uncomplicated participation, the great organization and the interesting contributions in the Engineering Newcomer 2016 Group deserve special praise", explain the participants Andreas Bair, Thomas Köpf and Manuel Wagner. (kj)