High School and college designers develop winning ideas in Extreme Redesign contest.

Did you ever think you’d need a place to put your electric toothbrush? While it night not seem like a priority in your life, a second thought may render strike a cord with any average homeowner. What about an extended electrical outlets or a device to hold your sandwich? These types of innovative designs came from the minds of this year’s winners in the Second Annual Extreme Redesign contest held by The Dimension 3D Printing Group, a division of Statasys Inc.

Extreme Redesign is a contest developed to help promote engineering education among high school and college students. (Product Design & Development is the exclusive media sponsor of the event.) The contest asks entrants to submit a .stl file of their “extreme redesign” to Dimension through an online submission form. The completed submission form included a 200-word description of the value and benefit of the part they wanted to enter. Dimension then sends entrants a 3D print of their design that they can hold in their hands and evaluate. From there, entrants have the opportunity to make any necessary design improvements and develop a second iteration for final submission.

In the process, some innovative designs are developed and the winners, chosen from a panel of judges working as professional engineers, receive scholarships in two separate categories. First-place winners in both the high school and college divisions receive $2,500 scholarships and two finalists in each division receive $1,000 scholarships. Winning students receive their prizes from Jon Cobb, vice president of 3D printing for The Dimension 3D Printing Group during a ceremony at National Manufacturing Week. (See adjacent box.)

According to Cobb, some of this year’s designs may actually have market value. “Some of these kids should be looking to get patents,” he says. “There were some [designs] that are really marketable.”

This year’s firstplace winners are Keith Liddy, a senior at Medina County Career Center in Brunswick, OH, in the high school category, and Bruce Cherry of Lake Washington Technical College in Mountlake Terrace, WA, and Gabi Ritter from the University of Art and Design in Halle/Saale, Germany, in the college category.

Liddy won for designing a detachable cord reel. Cherry is the designer of a wall-mount electric tootbrush holder. Ritter, who is both the first woman and one of the first overseas winners of the contest, won for an innovative calendar design.

Ritter is joined by Balaza Galambos of the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary, the only other finalist in the college category (because of the tie for first-place, only one finalist was selected), as the only foreign students to win in the Extreme Redesign contest. Galambos is the designer a holographic projection device.

Cobb says that this year’s contest received more than 500 entries, 10 times the number of entries last year. The contest received entries from U.S., Europe, Asia, and Singapore.

The two finalists in the high school competition are Joe Novello, a senior at Preble High School in Green Bay, WI, and Rick Barr, a junior at Kettering Fairmont High School in Kettering, OH. Novello is the designer of extendable electrical outlets. Barr designed a special sandwich holder. Judges for this year’s contest represented Harley-Davidson, S.C. Johnson, and SmartDesign. Cobb says that the judging was very close.

Dimension created the Extreme Redesign contest as a way to promote engineering education to young people and to ensure a future workforce for the industry as a whole. “The number of students coming out of technical schools and colleges with engineering degrees has dipped over the last couple of decades,” Cobb says. “It’s important that we continue to get more students excited about math and science to ensure we have a talented pool of engineers for tomorrow’s needs.”

Cobb says, regardless of who wins the contest each year, the goal of the competition is establish the necessary skills for young engineers to succeed in the future.

“The Extreme Redesign contest gets to the core of what drew most of us to the field of design engineering in the first place: creation and innovation,” he says. “Peaking the interest of more students that otherwise might not have considered pursuing a career in this field can only strengthen the overall level of talent.”

One of the more interesting aspects of the contest is the “redesign” element. Dimension takes advantage of its business knowledge and product lines to create 3D prototypes for the students. This year, Cobb says, approximately 25 students took advantage of the “second chance” provided by the 3D printouts to redesign their original idea.

Also new to the contest this year was a teacher incentive program. Earlier this year, Dimension announced that it had started a program to get teachers involved with the contest. The program awards teachers of first-place winners and the teacher with the most student entries with a Dell notebook computer.

Next StepMore information on the Extrme Redesign contest is avaiable by contacting The Dimension 3D Printing Group, 14950 Martin Dr., Eden Prairie, MN 55344, or by visiting www.dimensionprinting.com/extreme.html.