James Redmond
News Reporter

Mesa State held its annual student showcase on Wednesday, April 28, with over 230 students participating.
The showcase was an opportunity for students to show what they have been working on this year. There were 13 categories in which individuals presented their work. This could take the form of a demonstration, exhibit, oral presentation, performance or poster.
“It’s certainly a little different than what we’ve done before. I think it’s a good experience for what the world’s going to be like,” said Brian Cook a freshman engineering major. “I’ll probably end up doing a lot of presentations like this so it’s a good experience.”
Other students enjoyed the experience.
“It would be nice to be in something like this again,” said Samuel Yenchick, a freshman mechanical engineering major.
The showcase presented several sights, sounds and tastes for the audience at the event.
The projects were presented to a group of judges who at the end of the day declared the best project for each category.
However, there was much more to gain from these presentations than just an award from the judges. In the case of Laverne Megee, her presentation was noticed by outside groups and she is now exploring options to present her research, “Radiocarbon Dating: History, Methods, Uses and Relationship to Other Radiometric Dating Methods,” to different geological groups.
Another presentation was an example of simple walking robots by two freshmen Computer Science majors, Luke Moses and Jonathan Mellor.
“When we first started off with this, it wasn’t at all a ‘let’s really do something with this,’ then it became ‘that’s interesting lets play with this a little,” Moses said, “and that turned into a ‘well, what can we do with this’ kind of thing.”
The robots that they had been working on since March were able to walk around on the floor of the room and in a basic manner navigate the obstacles of the room.
The Mesa State culinary competition team also made a delicious appearance near the entrance of Houston Hall.
“This (cooking) is basically what we did at the regional competition this year,” said Nick Winden, captain of the culinary team. While many of the people and groups were pushing themselves to bring forward the best presentation for judges they could, Winden said that for the culinary team, the showcase was really a lot of fun.
A team of students from the Career & Technical Programs category from WCCC were presented their working prototype of a lock down alert network for schools that they had designed. The project constructed a fully working school alert system for any sort of emergency. They managed to create the prototypes from off the shelf products and did so for under $80.
“[This project] was a lot of frustration, a lot of sleepless nights. And we’re happy to present something that works in the real world,” said Cy Dinnel, WCCC team member.
After all projects were presented the award ceremony was held in the Moss Performing Arts Recital Hall. A representative from each of the category announced the best project for that category. The team from WCCC was declared the winner of its category.
“We had a rough demonstration because of the way we set up, I was kind of thinking in the back of my mind, that a bad demonstration for a good project doesn’t really get you there, but it really worked out,” Dinnel said.
Other students from WCCC agreed with Dinnel.
“I really didn’t see how we could compete with some of the other projects, because what we did was all on our own, and we had to go out and learn some new things to put this together, this project and the research on it. So we didn’t have a lot of expensive equipment to show off,” said Don Latner, WCCC team member.
“I didn’t come here to win contests or look better than anybody, I really just wanted to pass my class, but we had a lot of fun, and if you do something well, it speaks for itself,” Dinnel said.
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jredmond@mesastate.edu