Private sponsorships have been the primary source of funding for Design Competition for the past 15 years, accounting for 100% of last year' s donations! Money is directed to various areas that are vital to the success of each year' s competition, including course design, team budgets, publicity, and prizes. In recognition of their support, corporate sponsors are exposed to some of Northwestern' s most intellectual and creative students. Sponsorship levels and perks are listed below:

Team kickoff events and milestones

We appreciate your support in making this event possible.

Design Competition 2007 Sponsors:

---

Hands on Experience

Design 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. It is an excellent opportunity for students to use the engineering design skills and creativity that they are developing during their undergraduate education. The nature of the competition is often interdisciplinary, so teams are usually comprised of students from several engineering disciplines working together. It is truly a concrete design experience that requires real-world thinking which can sometimes be overlooked in a strictly classroom environment.

DC encourages students to be innovative in all aspects of the competition: basic game strategy, robot design and competition rules, and course design.


Successful innovative strategies, have varied tremendously over the year from simple mechanical devices to

Exec Board DC2004

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. 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 competition, members are primarily responsible for a specific part of it.
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.

---

Community Outreach

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.