College students with an interest in bringing together software and hardware solutions to improve manufacturing operations now have an opportunity to leverage their creativity through the MTConnect Student Challenge, a competition that invites submissions for both ideas and applications utilizing the MTConnect standard.
Announced at last week's [MC]2 Conference in Chicago, the MTConnect Student Challenge is offering a total of $33,000 in cash prizes for winning submissions. MTConnect is an open-source, XML-based communications standard that fosters connectivity between manufacturing equipment and devices, according to the MTConnect Institute, McLean, Va. The MTConnect Student Challenge is open to students at the undergraduate and graduate level and may be of particular interest to students who are studying manufacturing-related fields (electrical, mechanical or industrial engineering) as well as software engineering and IT-related fields.
"The MTConnect Student Challenge seeks to engage the higher education community to promote innovative thinking and ideas, and ultimately to enable manufacturing intelligence breakthroughs for the defense manufacturing industry," said Douglas K. Woods, president of both the MTConnect Institute and AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology. "It is our collective hope that the MTConnect Student Challenge will inspire a broader base of software and system architects to build a new, skilled workforce by increasing students' awareness of advanced manufacturing technologies and develop MTConnect applications that can easily be adopted by manufacturers of all sizes."
Full rules and submission details are available clicking here.
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