Lighthearted competition just one reason why UVic’s first-year engineering enrolment jumps 30 per cent

The scene in the lobby of UVic’s centre engineering building is controlled mayhem.

Twenty-six teams of 10 first-year students are each wrestling with 1.5-metre lengths of white pvc piping, creating adult-sized versions of what appear to be stork-like tinker toys. In reality, the students are trying to build electromagnetic cranes capable of picking up piles of paper clips.

Confined to a 2.4-metre square, the teams work from identical boxes of supplies: one-inch piping in four different lengths, a collection of couplers, computer software and copper wire.

“It’s tedious and it feels kind of slimy,” says student Brody Holden, wrapping copper wire carefully around a coil to make a magnet.

Department staff watching over the students don’t tell them the secret to building a working crane in three hours is to oh-so-tightly wrap the copper wire onto the coil.

“The tighter the wrap, the stronger the magnet,” organizer Megan Jameson says in a hushed voice.

The first-week competition is not just to clue wannabe engineers into the importance of teamwork, it’s to provide a respite from the grinding foundation courses the students will face in their first two years of the four-year undergraduate program.

About 20 per cent of students in the university’s two undergraduate engineering programs migrate to other faculties after their first year, a tide the faculty’s dean says he would like to stem.

“We’re trying to make the first-year learning experience more exciting and interesting for the students,” Tom Tiedje says.

In addition to the first-week design competition, the department is including a first-year design course, which will also include competitions.

This year the faculty has experienced a 30-per-cent jump in first-year enrolment in its bachelor of engineering program and a 13-per-cent jump in the bachelor of computer science program. Tiedje wants to make sure those students graduate from engineering.

“In previous years, computer science enrolment back to the dot-com bubble in 2000 (enrolment) was declining, then it was stationary, now it’s starting to go back up,” he says. “The job market is quite good now in software, even though we are supposedly in a recession.”

As to the jump in B. Eng enrolment; “We’re still trying to understand it. We streamlined our admission process last year and improved recruiting and are doing things like this design project.”

First-year engineering student Georgia Fisher of Victoria says she’s in for the long haul. “I like math and physics and thought it was the best career to start off in.”

Crane-building teammate Sarah Allen, also from Victoria, says she was influenced by her engineering friends to head to the program.

“There’s definitely a personality type that comes with it, it’s not just mathematical intelligence, it’s being able to work in a team,” Allen says. “There’s a lot of camaraderie and it’s one of the only faculties that has events where we do stuff like this competition. I think that’s pretty epic.”

vmoreau@saanichnews.com