Another System Design and Management certificate program started this summer. The event ended with a robot design challenge which I managed along with Hamid and Kandarp. With just three organizers there was lots of work but it was a rewarding experience. This is a part of an article that appeared in the SDM alumni newsletter: “Certificate students spent the last two days of the workshop completing the Design Challenge (DC) Competition. SDM Fellows - Kandarp Bhatt, Avi Latner, and Hamid Salim - designed this challenge using the latest LEGO Mindstorm NXT kit with several stages of events having increasing difficulty. A primary premise of this particular exercise was that the events stressed different (sometimes conflicting) performance requirements, forcing teams to perform critical design tradeoffs. This year's teams exhibited outstanding inter-team collaboration during the long hours of the DC process. First place Design Challenge winners were: Nick Biersdorf, Brad Hitchler, ...