When they graduate next year, students in the Class of 2019 will remember April 26 as the heyday of their college lives. Hey Day is the annual rite of passage for juniors, when they move up the class ranks to become seniors.
Since this year’s theme is water, the students had to create autonomous robots that would move through LEGO field models and accomplish tasks such as collecting rain water, helping flowers grow, and putting out fires.
Building futures through LEGOs
In the FIRST LEGO League tournament, middle school teams mentored by Penn Engineering students worked to design and build robots related to the theme of water.
Ammo, a 7-month-old Belgian Malinois, works the rubble pile at the Working Dog Center on the Pennovation Works campus. Trainers and volunteers hide amidst the debris to refine dogs’ ability to detect the scent of a concealed person.
Celebrating five years of working dogs at Penn
The Working Dog Center began with just a few puppies, and now, five years later, has trained some of the best noses in the business. Canine graduates have gone on to police work, search and rescue, and explosives, narcotics, and diabetes detection.
Sung is developing design software to enable people without an engineering background to create custom origami robots that can move on the ground. The tool, called Interactive Robogami, is based on a database of robot parts which users can combine together like a “virtual Lego set.”
These small robots are inspired by origami
Through origami-inspired engineering, one researcher hopes to not only create rapidly fabricable robots, but also build intuitive design software that enables others who may not be trained in engineering to create their own personalized robots.
Penn Engineering students Wanda Lipps, Gautam Nagaraj, and Michael Gromis, all members of the Mars Water Horizons team, use a robot they built to drill through a container of soil, clay and ice. The goal is to create something that will be able to extract ice from the surface of Mars, then melt and filter it into drinkable water that could also be used as rocket fuel.
Exploring new worlds: Penn students design an ice drilling robot for Mars
The team’s robot is designed to drill through soil on Mars, extract ice and clay, and then melt the ice and filter it into drinkable water.
Penn President Amy Gutmann celebrated the University graduates of the Class of 2017, along with family, friends, the academic community, alumni, and Commencement speaker Cory Booker, Democratic U.S. Senator for New Jersey.
Hey Day, a beloved tradition that is unique to Penn, was first held in 1916.
Hey Day 2017
At the annual tradition that marks the official passage of the junior class to senior status, participants joyfully marched down Locust Walk to College Green, holding bamboo canes and donning Styrofoam hats.
Biden talks world affairs, tells students to engage and 'jump in'
The former vice president sat down with Penn President Amy Gutmann on March 30 for a conversation on the United States’ role in global affairs. Throughout the discussion, Biden aimed his remarks at the audience of students—who he called “the most generous generation in American history.”
Penn hosts cancer conversation with Biden, other experts at Silfen University Forum
The wide-ranging discussion emphasized the importance of collaboration among researchers, the challenge of prevention, and the crucial importance of discovery and innovation in reaching milestones in cancer prevention and treatment.
Shakespeare and his co-authors, as told by Penn engineers
Four hundred years after the death of dramatist William Shakespeare, enduring questions remain about whether the Bard of Avon had an uncredited co-writer on some of his world-famous plays. A team of Penn researchers has found an answer—in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, of all places.
