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--- Robotics

The college's robotics team works on designing, fabricating, assembling, and repairing their own robots for various competitions and activities throughout the year. The team works with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) programs to plan out the parts that must be made in order to create the robot. The team is then allowed access to a machining laboratory in the TEC building through a manufacturing course where they design and create their own robotics parts. This course teaches them to operate mills, lathes, band saws, as well as other tools for the projects. With this, they are able to a get hands-on learning experience from this club.

In 2019, College of DuPage was ranked as the number one robotics technology/technician college in Illinois. They participate in the yearly Midwestern Robotics Design Competition (MRDC) hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that requires teams to design their robots to complete various objectives that differ each year. College of DuPage has been the only two-year institution invited to the competition, competing with other four-year universities such as Illinois Institution of Technology, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois at Chicago, Northern Illinois University, Valparaiso University, and Southern Illinois University. In 2019 they placed in the top ten.

The team also participates in the annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This competition requires students to design robots to drive over a Mars simulation of icy-regolith. They must then excavate rocks from this surface and dump them into a collector bin. The ranking depends on points scored in categories such as systems engineering report, outreach report, presentation & demonstration, professional conduct & sportsmanship, and amount of rocks mined. In 2018 they placed ninth as one of two community colleges among 50 teams including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, Colorado School of Mines, and Purdue University. Their best-scoring category was from the outreach report with a score of 18 out of 20 points possible. The team is required to participate in outreach activities in order to score in this category. The college reaches out to home-schooled children as well as girl scouts, middle schools, and more. In these events, the team designs engineering projects for them to work through and ask questions from the collegiate engineers.

Engineering Pathways

College of DuPage offers an Engineering 2+2 Program partnered with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to earn a bachelor degree in engineering. Created in 2014, the program provides guaranteed transfer admission to their College of Engineering if specific qualifications are maintained throughout the two years. This program requires students to follow a planned arrangement of correlating courses that will set them up for their third collegiate year at the University of Illinois. They must maintain standards of academic success determined by the university each year in order to provide proof of equivalence. Academic counselors specializing in this program are assigned to each student to guide them through the transfer process.The participating majors include: aerospace engineering, agricultural and biological engineering, civil engineering, environmental engineering, computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, engineering mechanics, engineering physics, general engineering, industrial engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, as well as nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering.