The MSU College of Engineering invites you to a showcase of our best and brightest at the 2025 Spring Engineering Design Day on April 25, 2025. One of MSU’s premier academic events, over 600 Spartan Engineering students will display their creative projects from 8:00 am to noon in the Engineering Building, 428 S. Shaw Lane, East Lansing. The event is free and open to the public.
Now in its 31st year, Design Day will include students from the Departments of Applied Engineering Sciences, Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.
According to Executive Director of Design Day and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Wayne Dyksen, a total of 223 student teams will present their ideas to visitors, faculty, and industry experts during the impressive display of ingenuity and innovation. Capstone projects will feature 699 students on 134 teams this spring.
“It gives our students the chance to show that they can think on their feet,” Dyksen said. “You can walk down the halls of the Engineering Building and see how ready our students are to enter the engineering profession,” he noted.
Design Day includes competitions and project presentations from a variety of engineering classes. The 15-week capstone course, which is required for graduation, provides a platform for students to apply the knowledge and experiences gained throughout their engineering education. Working in teams, seniors put their best efforts into solving real-world problems for big and small companies. At the end of each semester, teams present at Design Day. Eleven top awards will be presented during the Awards Ceremony at 1:15 p.m. in Room 1281, Anthony Hall, which is connected to the Engineering Building.
View the 2025 Design Day projects and teams here.
The following are examples of Design Day projects:
- Team Stryker IST: Surgical Needle Tracking
Every day, millions of medical procedures are performed by surgeons who face the critical issue of retained surgical needles. These small but essential tools sometimes go missing during procedures, leading to severe complications, extended hospital stays, and costly corrective surgeries for the patient. The traditional solution is to perform additional X-rays and time-consuming manual counts, which are far from foolproof. Our Surgical Needle Tracking system is an iOS app designed to detect, track, and document surgical needles in real-time during an operation to enhance patient safety and streamline surgical workflows. The team’s Design Day display will show simulated surgery on a foot.
- Team Michigan State University Linguistics: Crowd-Sourcing Intuitions of Vowel Classifications
One variation in language is dialect evolution. While dialect boundaries in North America have remained relatively unchanged, the ways in which people pronounce words continue to evolve. Traditional dialect atlases rely on methods that limit their accuracy and scope, and traditional linguistics research relies on limited data points to study these shifts. Our Crowd-Sourcing Intuitions of Vowel Classifications system reimagines linguistic data collection by introducing a web application that enables real-time vowel classification. Linguists classify thousands of words efficiently, contributing to a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of dialect evolution.
- Team NetJets: Airport Capacity and Ground Space Management
To serve their owners effectively, NetJets fleet operates in over 3,000 airports to provide a responsive on-demand service. Balancing the capacity levels of each airport is therefore a constant challenge in the quest for a high level of service in the air and on the ground: if an airport starts to near capacity, they must relocate planes to other Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) or airports to accommodate incoming flights. Currently, NetJets employees must calculate the available ground space of airports and determine the best distribution of their planes with very limited automation. Our Airport Capacity and Ground Management system provides a visual representation of the capacity levels at their busiest airports, as well as provide recommended actions to be taken for optimal fleet management.
- Team The Digesters: Carbon intensity calculator for Michigan dairy farm renewable natural gas site selection
Consumers Energy is establishing additional partnerships with Michigan dairy farmers. Dairy manure can be used to generate renewable natural gas (RNG) through anaerobic digestion. Producing RNG from dairy manure can have significantly negative carbon intensity (CI) scores, which indicates a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This reduction can offset Consumers’ other operations such as conventional natural gas production. To decide if a dairy farm is suitable for a project, the team designed an Excel calculator to estimate RNG production and CI score for a potential project location.
- Team SDP Prevention: Prevention of harmful algal blooms in Soldan Dog Park Pond
Harmful algal bloom (HAB) events are increasing in prevalence at Soldan Dog Park Pond. This causes numerous park closures across multiple seasons. The leading cause of HAB events is excessive nutrients, specifically phosphate. This project aimed to prevent HAB events at Soldan Dog Park Pond by controlling levels of phosphate entering the pond via stormwater inlet pipes. After measuring the phosphate in the pond and doing predictive modeling with OpenHydroQual, the chosen design solution is a modular horizontal pipe filter with iron-enhanced media.
Fall 2025 Design Day by the numbers
Design Day
- 31st Year for Design Day (Began in Spring 1994)
Engineering Student Participation
- # Teams - 223
- # Students - 1048
Capstone Projects
- # Students - 699
- # Teams - 134
- # Sponsored Projects - 104
- # 74 (71%) Michigan-Based Companies and Institutions
Awards
- 15 Awards from Fall Semester 2024 & Spring Semester 2024
- Spring Semester 2025 awards given by AESC, CE, CSE, ECE & ME
- Conferred by Corporate and Faculty Judges
For more information, contact Professor Wayne Dyksen (dyksen@msu.edu, 517-353-5573) or Courtney Kosloski (marti884@msu.edu, 517-353-8133).
MSU College of Engineering Media and Public Relations page