Regional Alpe-Adria Round – EBEC Alpe-Adria is an annual event organized by local BEST groups from Erlangen, Vienna, Graz, Ljubljana, Maribor and Zagreb. It is preceded by six local qualification rounds, one in each of those cities, and is itself one of 15 regional or national competitions that delegate their winners to EBEC.
EBEC Alpe-Adria 2014 will take place at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Maribor, on May 16th - 18th. During event, 48 local round winners will compete in two categories: team design and case study, solving different engineering and management problems. After their work is done, the teams will have a chance to present the outcomes in front of a jury, professors and student auditorium on a large-scale stage. On 18th of May, jury will announce best teams who will represent this region in EBEC Final competition.
Every team has to design and construct a prototype that should satisfy competition requirements. The teams have a certain time limit and have to use tools and materials provided by the organizers or company which give the task. Therefore, they need to use creativity, technical comprehension and skills in order to accomplish tasks and pass final testing in front of a jury. The criteria for evaluating the outcomes are predetermined. For example, a good team design task would be to create the most efficient wind turbine whose efficiency would be tested by a strong ventilator.
Every team has to study a certain real-life or imaginary corporate or other problem and provide a well-described set of solutions for handling such an issue. Problems can be either technical or management oriented by nature. The results are evaluated by a jury, after presentations made by each team. For example, one of case study tasks set at previous EBEC competitions was “Design the Feature of the Future” improving one of the world’s top web browsers.
