About

What is the Engineering & IT Case Competition?

The competition takes place once a year and provides Engineering and Information Technology students with the opportunity to work within a multidisciplinary team and craft responses to a genuine industry challenge.

The Engineering & IT Case Competition provides students with an opportunity to:

• Network with industry representatives
• Be a part of a team
• Contribute ideas to a real life scenario
• Apply what you have learned in the classroom
• Sharpen your professional skills
• Develop your industry experience
• Win some great prizes!

GUIDE FOR INDUSTRY

The Case Competition is an opportunity for Engineering and IT students to develop creative solutions to a real-world industry challenge. The event is held in Semester 2 every year with students coming together to form multidisciplinary teams, bringing with them knowledge from each of their courses to contribute to their response.

In 2022, electrical engineering student, Zachari Orelowitz partnered with Abigail Bloom from environmental engineering and Ben Field from biomedical engineering to produce a project design on ‘Solar Panel recycling’ which won first prize at the competition.

“Working in a team was fantastic with each member of our team having a different history.  It's been really fun to combine all our skills together to come up with the project.” -Zachari Orelowitz

What are the benefits?

Industry partners will be able to collaborate and network with students, provide feedback and guidance, as well as learn from the next generation of problem solvers.

They might even consider sponsoring worthy ideas to help the students develop them into real-world applications that could assist their own companies.

Students  receive insight into some of the predominant challenges facing engineering and tech industries today and thereby develop the latest skills necessary to resolve these problems, along with industry support.

“We're now working with Elecsome to try to find a way to use our project more. Even though we’ve finished with the Case Competition, we’re still working with the industry partner and working on this technology.” -Zachari Orelowitz

What does an industry-student partnership look like?

For the Case competition, industry partners and students work together to solve a problem. The students create a concept design that can assist the partner with a particular project or develop a new process. For Elecsome, the Case Competition was about improving how we can recycle and upcycle solar panels to avoid waste. As a business, that’s what they do, and it came down to the students to find ways to improve that process. By looking at additional components to recycle or new ways to extract value, the project gave Ben, Abigail and Zachari the chance to put their skills to the test.

For their project, Zachari, Abigail and Ben worked with Elecsome, “Australia's first solar panel upcycling plant" to develop their response to ‘How we can we use the natural environment and biology to recycle metals from solar panels?’. Elecsome was able to support their design along the way.

“Elecsome has been really excited to work with us to pull off this idea – and working with an industry partner that’s passionate about this makes it easy to work with them.  As a team, we’ve been able to bring our different skills and perspectives from our fields of engineering and then Elecsome has been able to give us ideas about how this kind of work gets put into practice and their existing processes.” - Zachari Orelowitz

How the competition will run

Student teams will engage in a series of workshops to guide them through their projects. This competition is held in two stages, with the final stage culminating in a design concept proposal presentation to a panel of industry judges.

Through this process, the team was able to receive consultation from Elecsome and were guided through the development of their design. “We had a couple of discussions with Elecsome about their existing processes to get a bit more detail.” - Abigail Bloom

Further information

For more information, you can submit your enquiries to engit-studentenrich@unimelb.edu.au.