MURFRESBORO, Tenn. — Moving to the new, 90,000-square-foot Applied Engineering Building, the award-winning Middle Tennessee State University Engineering Technology Experimental Vehicles Program has new space to grow.

Engineering Technology professor Saeed Foroudastan and MTSU student Andrew Starkey discuss the hands-on program — with nationally competitive lunar rover, solar boat and Baja buggy — in the September edition of “Out of the Blue,” MTSU’s television magazine show with host Andrew Oppmann, vice president of the Marketing and Communications Division.

Foroudastan and Starkey showed Oppmann the Baja, which competes at an Ohio event, and the lunar rover, which competes in an international event at the NASA Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. They are vehicles that attract the attention of Blackman Collegiate Academy, Civil Air Patrol and other K-12 students when they visit.

“They design, build and learn about hands-on experience and teamwork,” Foroudastan said of the MTSU students in the program. “I let them make mistakes. They learn from their mistakes.” 

You can watch the segment here:

At competitions, Foroudastan said if something malfunctions on a project by one of the larger universities or institutions, “somebody comes and fixes it for them. Our students, if something breaks, the student makes it (fix) because they have already made it hands-on themselves.”

The hands-on system “allows you to use school principles and allows you to use it on a physical project,” said Starkey, a junior mechatronics engineering major. “A lot of students don’t have that physical aspect. Of course, you can pass a certain number of classes, but can you actually do it in real life?”

Learning in this type of environment helps students “get a job, make more money and then, because of the experience they have, they can do an excellent job at the company where they are working,” said Foroudastan, who actively recruits high school, middle school and even MTSU students who may not be engineering or mechatronics majors.

Engineering Technology is one of 11 College of Basic and Applied Sciences departments. To learn more about the MTSU Experimental Vehicles Program, visit https://et.mtsu.edu/evp/.

To watch, listen

• “Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. 

• It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 and 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 6:30 p.m. Sundays; WKRN+ at 7 p.m. Thursdays and noon Sundays; via streaming on MTSU’s Jazz Network on WMOT HD2 and through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings. 

• It is also available as a podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music, iHeart and as individual interview segments on primary host Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3.

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue.

— Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)