SFWE students code the future at 2025 Craig M. Berge Design Day
Team 25048’s golf-putting robot Gopher combines the fun of sports and the power of engineering to swing a hole-in-one with two shots or fewer.
Thousands of attendees gathered on May 5 for the College of Engineering's 2025 Craig M. Berge Design Day – an annual opportunity for engineering seniors to present the results of their yearlong capstone class in the Student Union Memorial Center ballroom and on the University of Arizona mall. Students from majors across the college made up 79 multidisciplinary teams that completed projects requested by industry and university sponsors.
Provoking curiosity in STEM
The $7,500 top prize, the Craig M. Berge Dean’s Award for Most Outstanding Project, went to Team 25048 for Gopher, a golf-putting robot. Its goal: to demonstrate engineering concepts in a way that inspires K-12 students to consider pursuing careers in the engineering field.
Team members took Gopher to Catalina Foothills High School and Sahuaro High School before Design Day presentations. The robot sparked interest with its autonomous and manual features, but team member MiLee Vogel was most excited to demonstrate the latter.
The software engineering senior connected the robot’s mechanical components to an Xbox controller and screen, enabling the user to manually control the robot and precisely line up each shot.
“I love being able to design what you see on the screen and make something happen with tech,” she said. “That probably comes from my love of video games.”
Employing AI to improve health care
Another team employed artificial intelligence to improve medical care in developing countries. Team 25033 created MD-Sensei, an AI-powered smartphone application that delivers science-backed clinical guidance based on thousands of medical documents.
The team trained a large language model to feed the app’s AI chatbot with medical documents provided by the sponsor’s volunteer doctors. When prompted, the chatbot creates a summary of relevant medical research based on the user’s request.
“The same code base works on IOS and Android phones, and we made an administration website where doctors from our sponsor can manage the system and view answers the AI is generating,” said team member Oliver Seymour, a software engineering senior.
Seymour’s team won The Mensch Foundation Award for Best Use of Embedded Intelligence.