The ME 200: Thermodynamics final project award ceremony and exhibition was held on the Monumental Study Steps of the Campus Instructional Facility on Wednesday at 11 a.m.

The ceremony featured the final projects of ME 200 students who were challenged to combine art and engineering to tell “their story” about fossil-fired steam power.

Students took the challenge creatively, conveying their message through interpretive dances, graphic novels, virtual reality simulations and more. In total, the event featured 40 projects, with six top finalists and one overall winner.

Leon Liebenberg, the instructor of the course and supervisor of the award ceremony, gave his students full freedom, believing that they would understand the subject more through engagement with the project.

“I believe in getting students to buy into a project or into an area of learning their way: I did not specify which creative framework or which art form they must use, I left it up to them,” Liebenberg said. “So, students must decide how they want to tell the story. Who am I to tell them how to tell a story?”

One of the top teams — “TV newscast” with Kevin Ho, Carson Lee, Joseph Symanski and Max Goldstein, who created a real news report about the Abbott Power Plant — said this project helped them to connect the dots and concepts in the course.

“I think from finishing the class, like, my big takeaway is that it’s a lot of these simple concepts that kind of connect together to be more complicated,” Goldstein said. “And doing a news report with a bunch of segments was the easiest way to kind of cover all the general stuff, and then when you’re in the class it’s really just connecting them together to more complicated outcomes.”

The Monumental Study Steps of CIF were crowded, welcoming more than 200 students and guests. According to Liebenberg, he was happy that this ceremony and project were a way to emotionally connect students to the course.

“I’m elated that the students have learned so much, I’m trying to get an emotion for the students and I’m trying to get the students to forge an emotional link with the subject contents,” Liebenberg said. “And I think if people are happy, if they’ve got good positive emotions regarding a course, they remember things so much longer.”

The team of Marit Ley, Kaitlyn Uhlman, Marshall Tenzer and Olivia Hunsberger became the overall winner of the event. They created an interpretive dance with a spoken word poem about sustainable power and environment.

According to the team, they decided to merge their hobbies with engineering and just have fun, which was why they were surprised with their victory.

“I’m honestly just kind of surprised, I’ve been a competitive dancer my whole life, so I just brought up this idea,” Ley said. “It started to kind of as a joke, and then Marshall brought up the idea that he has been really experienced with creative writing, and then it all came together.”

The team hopes their project helped to draw attention to the issue of global warming and that humanity takes action to tackle it.

“As a writer, I hope that it did work as a call to action to the audience: I want people to know that global warming is a very scary problem,” Tenzer said. “And it really is a note to ourselves that we need to implement change now, there’s no time to wait.”

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