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Kathan Bender tinkers with a bamboo water fountain created by his team for Freshman Engineering Design Day.

The bubble-blowing machine created by Morgan Danyi and her team worked just fine except for one minor problem: It didn't blow any bubbles.

Some parts spun too fast. The unstable platform wobbled. The bubble solution carried by spinning wands spilled before reaching the bubble-blowing fan. No solution, no bubbles.

Something had to be done. In two weeks, Danyi and her team planned to enter the machine into NC State's 13th Annual Freshman Engineering Design Day.

"Being an engineer is all about trial and error," Danyi, a freshman in chemical engineering, said after some last-minute tweaks made the machine competition-ready. "You identify the problem, brainstorm a way to resolve it and then create the finished product."

Freshman Engineering Design Day brings together more than 1,300 students on more than 400 teams who have completed design projects assigned in the College's introductory engineering course. Students huddle in groups for several weeks before the event, assembling hovercrafts, stitching together fabric buckets, molding concrete canoes, engineering nuclear reactor probes and tinkering with chain-reaction-driven Rube Goldberg machines.

All that work culminates in a day-long competition held in two packed rooms of students, faculty, judges and parents at NC State's McKimmon Center on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Medals are awarded to the winners.

 
Morgan Danyi (in yellow) and her Design Day team overcame technical hurdles to create a working bubble-blowing machine.

"Design Day is the defining first-semester experience for engineering students," said Brian Koehler, the director of international engagement for the College who helps run the event. "It's a great opportunity for our first-year engineers to tackle difficult engineering problems they'll be facing during the next four years and ultimately in their professional careers."

Each project comes with its own set of constraints. Students must not exceed a $40 spending limit, which encourages creativity and innovation by forcing them to reuse, borrow and find creative resources in places other than store shelves.

That spirit of frugality and reusability was on display at this year's event, where students used toy cars, old plastic containers, aluminum foil, scrap wood, oil funnels, rubber bands, Pez dispensers, Tupperware containers and duct tape to build their entries.

Personalization is encouraged. A plastic watering can and holiday lights topped a flower-rimmed fountain. Arcade pinballs pummeled miniature Duke and UNC mascots. 18-inch concrete canoes - they can hold 10 pounds of marbles if built properly - were proudly painted NC State red.

For Danyi, the event turned out to be more than just a first-semester highlight. It gave her the chance to be a team leader and employ problem-solving skills when things didn't go as planned.

After the bubble-blowing failure, the team regrouped and devised a new design. A battery-powered motor in an overturned toy truck spun a wheel that had been cut from the bottom of a five-gallon plastic bucket. Because the wheel was larger and heavier than the CD covers they had originally used, the spinning wands that cradled the bubble solution became much more rigid, allowing the machine to spit out bubbles by the dozens.

The relieved team had its entry.

"The experiences at Design Day are a very accurate taste of what engineers will have to deal with in the real world," Danyi said.

Kathan Bender, a freshman majoring in civil engineering and environmental engineering, said the event improved his team's time management skills and taught team members the value of advance planning.

The group entered the water fountain competition, in which students must create a device that propels water upward against gravity. Bender and his team decided to meet early in the semester to begin work.

 
Students ready their projectile launcher for the competition.

The group built its waterfall from bamboo stalks. The stalks were tied together with twine and then set into a bamboo box filled with water and small stones. The water, propelled by an electric pump, was able to flow through a plastic tube encased in the central bamboo stalk, emerging out of the top and flowing back down into the box.

"After choosing the water fountain as our project, we had to decide on a theme and what parts of the project we wanted to assign to each person," Bender said. "Then we started planning the layout, gathering materials and putting it all together. It helped me learn the necessity of getting everything drawn out in advance before you start working."

Although Bender's team didn't receive a medal, he believes the group's bamboo water fountain was a crowd-pleaser that "gained the popular vote" of visitors to their table. Danyi's team didn't medal either, but that didn't take away from the event's positive experiences.

"Figuring out how to put our strengths together and working through problems are going to be very valuable experiences for the future," Danyi said. "Teamwork and effective communication are highly important for any group of people working together on a project."

The skills learned through Design Day help prepare Danyi, Bender and hundreds of other students for the more challenging projects to come in their academic and professional careers.

"Design Day helps our first-year engineers continue developing their interdisciplinary teamwork, problem-solving and communication skills while creating something that works," Koehler said. "With these skills, students can become leaders who solve challenging problems."

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“I’m calling it U.T.-T.B.D. That’s the stage we’re at,” said Robert S. Nelsen, the president of the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, using the abbreviation for “to be determined.”

But the matter is not entirely a mystery. The institution, which will open once its accreditation has been secured, will be a part of the University of Texas System and is expected to start out with 28,000 students, making it among the county’s largest institutions serving primarily Hispanic students. It will have a medical school, which, like the rest of the university, will have locations throughout the Valley. The system’s plans include physical presences in Brownsville, Edinburg, Harlingen and McAllen.

But first, Gov. Rick Perry must sign Senate Bill 24, by State Senator Juan Hinojosa, Democrat of McAllen. That would give the go-ahead to the University of Texas Board of Regents to abolish the University of Texas at Brownsville and U.T.-Pan American and combine their resources to create the new institution.

“This is not about merging the two universities,” said Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., Democrat of Brownsville. “It is about creating a new one. We have an incredible opportunity now to become one valley and one region.”

The university’s academic offerings will largely be located on the existing Brownsville and Edinburg campuses, both of which are expected to grow. And S.B. 24 requires that the first two years of the medical school’s classes be primarily offered in Hidalgo County, where facilities will have to be built, and that the second two years be primarily offered at what is currently the Regional Academic Health Center in Harlingen.

Administrative offices will be distributed throughout the region, with the primary headquarters likely to be located in McAllen.

In December, Francisco G. Cigarroa, the University of Texas System’s chancellor, revealed his plan to replace the two smaller universities with a single larger institution. The design included a full-fledged medical school as part of the university. Such a combination was virtually unheard of in Texas until recently, when the University of Texas at Austin announced plans to build its own medical school.

The proposal needed the support of at least two-thirds of state lawmakers, which would allow the new university to access the Permanent University Fund, a major source of revenue that only certain institutions can tap. The two existing Valley universities were the only two U.T. System institutions ineligible for the fund’s proceeds, a major impediment to their growth.

With the proposal getting the required support from lawmakers during the 83rd legislative session, it awaits the signature of Mr. Perry, who has signaled his support. After the bill passed through both chambers, he issued a statement, calling it “a historic moment.”

After the governor signs S.B. 24, Dr. Cigarroa said, “the real work begins.” The chancellor anticipates it will take 12 to 18 months to get the plan for the university laid out, reviewed and accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The system is working to determine how quickly the regents can allocate money from the Permanent University Fund to new buildings and faculty recruitment efforts. The new medical school is expected to graduate its first class in 2018.

“We’re going to start moving fairly fast, but not overly fast where we don’t get the input that’s necessary to make a university great,” Dr. Cigarroa said.

Faculty members from the two universities have begun holding informal meetings, said Elizabeth Heise, the president of U.T.-Brownsville’s faculty senate.

“There’s a lot of anticipation of something new, and people are excited,” she said.

Recently, rather than designing a new university, much of the work at U.T.-Brownsville has been dismantling an old one. For the last two decades, the university has operated with Texas Southmost College, a two-year school, as a single entity. That partnership recently unraveled. The completion of the split will come no later than 2015, so the university is in the process of vacating the property owned by Texas Southmost College.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name given to U.T.-Pan American teams. They are the Broncs, not the Broncos.

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