The fifth year of a students competition called EBEC (European BEST Engineering Competition) was happening on 4th November 2016. EBEC is a competition organized by a student organization called BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) over the whole Europe. First local round has been held at Prague in November.
The winners of this local round are advancing to the regional round, which will be happening in April in Brno. In regional round the winners will be standing against the winners from local rounds from Poland, Slovakia and Austria. The winners of regional round will go to the final round where they will compete with students from the whole Europe.
Students always choose from two categories of the competition – Team Design and Case Study. The topic for Team Design was prepared by company Procter&Gamble and the idea and key was to build line from building kit called Merkur which will be able to fill in two bottles of different size and two different colours. From the beginning the task seemed to be very difficult, but students showed their imagination and skills of future engineers and after 7 hours of competition they came with functional machines.
Criteria for evaluation of students machines were also the amount of water spilled around by their machines and also small presentation about their team, their machine and how they got the idea of exact construction of the machine.The winners of this category became team called Bořivoj a Lacláči which won plenty of prices from university sponsors and a keg of beer.
The topic of category Case Study was prepared by a company Kamax. They presented a real problem from today’s world which was a manufacturing process in a company with low effectivity. The task was to come up with innovative idea how to change the production or to come up with some logistic solution and make things more efficient and of course present the whole idea, all within only 6 hours.
After a long time of preparation, counting and planning, students presented their ideas to people from the company Kamax. It was great and all of them came with interesting ideas, but winner could be only one. That became team called 100Fiťáci.
It was a busy day for students who competed and for organizers. To show other passing students what was happening, organizers together with companies have prepared stands at the entrance of the electrotechnical faculty. Therefore the passing students could see what was happening, talk with companies like eMan, Škoda auto, Aero Vodochody, Automotive Lightning, Kamax and Procter&Gamble, see what they are doing or even try their products like a headset for virtual reality Oculus or a modified health bed, and maybe find their dream job.
After the busy day the winners of both categories were announced, the prices were given and organizers prepared small reception for students and sponsors. The day was over and everybody could relax and talk or discuss the day, talk with organizers about the student organization BEST or with people from companies who took a part in preparing the tasks or were presenting themselves during the day.