Celebrating Student Success

Gold and silver for Ontario Tech Engineering students in National Designathon

From placements to co-ops to internships, hands-on learning embedded in the curriculum at Ontario Tech University takes many forms. Experiential learning opportunities encourage students to show off their practical skills and academic knowledge in external environments to demonstrate their readiness for the workplace.

Student competitions are another key venue for students to put their abilities to the test in front of a wide audience. And this spring, two teams of Ontario Tech Engineering students took the top-two spots in the National Design League’s first-ever National Designathon.

The National Designathon is a 36-hour, worldwide event that brings together the most creative design thinkers, innovators and future leaders to tackle some of society’s most-challenging problems. Teams that finished topthree in local (campus) Designathons during 2020-2021 were invited. Ontario Tech had two teams competing for the national title: the winning teams from both the 2020 and the 2021 Ontario Tech Design League competitions.

This year’s Designathon challenge was to create a ‘blow-off-valve’ (BOV) for a hypothetical automotive startup company that’s launching a performance vehicle. BOVs are pressure-release systems present in most turbocharged engines that take the load off the turbocharger when the throttle is suddenly closed.

Ontario Tech’s winning BOV design was inspired by a 2003 Ford World Rally Car that saved the excess turbocharged air from its BOV, creating an amazing antilag system. The team named its design The Hamburger, because of its shape. Aside from battling sleep deprivation during a 36-hour remote competition, other challenges included having to learn about BOVs from YouTube videos and learning how to CAD (computeraided design) drawing of a spring.

Ontario Tech’s first-place student team at the National Designathon (from top left): Derek Yeung, Autumn Lesco, Mark Rizk and Dharma Solaiman from the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science.

“I am very proud of our Engineering students. To see them taking the knowledge they learned in class and apply it outside of the classroom to win a national competition is very inspiring. It shows the passion that they have for engineering.”