Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professors Allen Taflove and Alan Sahakian began Design Competition twelve years ago as a small design project for the members of Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical engineering honor society. Under Professor Taflove's direction, Design Competition has grown from its modest beginnings into a highly successful robotics competition that involves many McCormick students. Every year, the scope of the competition has increased as more students get involved and the competition itself becomes more technically challenging for both the competitors and the DC Executive Board. Last year's design Competition, DC 2001, was the largest and most successful Design Competition to date, attracting about 125 student competitors and more than 600 spectators from the University and its surrounding communities. The competitors comprise of the most creative and dynamic students of all majors in McCormick. In order to prepare for our competition, student teams design, build, and test their autonomous robots over a period of 6 months before the event. Last year, the Sesqui-Scramble course, was designed by the Executive Board. The course had two main components that allowed the robots to score. In order to score points, the robots had to maneuver throughout the two mazes to collect golf balls and/or attempt to climb a ramp and conquer our "Sesqui-Switch." The variety in our courses as well as the different strategies of each competing team is what makes each competition just as interesting. This year's competition DC 2002, will continue this tradition of excellence.

Design Competition gives students an excellent opportunity to use the engineering design skills and creativity that they are developing during their undergraduate education. It is truly a concrete design experience that requires real-world thinking which can sometimes be overlooked in a strictly classroom environment. The competition is an open-ended problem to which competitors devise their own strategy and implement their robotic design within the bounds of certain basic rules. Because the nature of the competition is often interdisciplinary, teams are usually comprised of students from several engineering disciplines working together. The experience of working with others with different backgrounds offers students a glimpse of what they can expect throughout their careers.

Innovation is often the key element behind the most successful DC competitors. DC encourages students to be innovative in all aspects of the competition: basic game strategy, robot design, and competition rules and course design (Executive Board). Successful innovative strategies, for instance, have varied tremendously over the year from simple mechanical devices to complex programming of the agents based on anticipation of other team's strategies.

Student members of the Executive Board also benefit greatly from the DC experience but in a somewhat different way than the competitors do. The Board's main responsibility is the overall management of the competition. While each member performs many tasks necessary during the yearlong planning required for the implementation of the competition, members are primarily responsible for a specific part of competition. These areas include overall management, finance, course construction and rules direction, public relations, team management, logistics and event planning, and Internet development. Being part of the Executive Board is a great experience in managing a project of considerable magnitude.

Design Competition, which occurs as the culmination of McCormick Engineers Week in May, is an outdoor spectacle that many members of the university and the surrounding communities have enjoyed attending. In fact many of last year's spectators were local junior high and high school students who were given an exciting glimpse into the fun and creativity involved in engineering design. This year we hope to do an even better job in reaching out to our local schools. In order to entice more young students to come and watch Design Competition, this year we hope to have a free raffle for the youngsters in which they can win educational and science-oriented prizes. In addition, we offered for the 2nd time, a total of $1000 in scholarship to deserving graduating high school students.

Sponsors benefit from Design Competition via exposure to many of McCormick's brightest students. As in our past Design Competitions, a table will be provided to allow company personnel to interact with McCormick students and other attendees during the day of the competition. The sponsor will also gain exposure via company logos placed on the course, on the competitors T-shirts, and on the official DC 2002 web page (http://msgroups.tech.northwestern.edu/dc). In addition to exposure, sponsors will also receive a resume book of the competitors. We believe this will help in your recruiting efforts at Northwestern. By contributing $5000 to DC 2002, the sponsor can become a Gold Sponsor. In addition to the exposure provided to all donors, Gold Sponsors will be invited to a preview reception and breakfast the morning of the competition, where they will the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Dean, John Birge, the members of the student teams and their faculty advisors, and the members of the DC 2002 Executive Board