For engineering students, it’s senior presentation time

And for those who travel on two wheels, there is PubLock: Secure your bike to a rack with a wave of an electronic key card.

The range of creativity is enough to make one believe that a chunk of the world's problems could be solved by teams of 21-year-olds, a string of all-night brainstorming sessions, and cold pizza.

Few, if any, of the projects end up on the market, as students tend to go their separate ways after graduation. But at Penn, professors say, an increasing number of teams each year file disclosures to preserve their patent rights.

At Drexel this year, at least one group already has lined up a client. Students designed a stormwater retention dam for the Unitarian Society of Germantown, which church officials aim to build after securing a grant. "It's fantastic," said Bill Blasdel, cochair of the building and grounds committee for the church on Lincoln Drive.

Another Drexel team is retrofitting a van with equipment for mobile testing of air quality in the Marcellus Shale region.

Even for projects that do not make it beyond the prototype stage, the process marks a full-strength dose of the real world, said Beth Winkelstein, associate dean for undergraduate education at Penn's engineering school. That includes coming up with an idea, setting and meeting goals, evaluating the results, and presenting them.

"There's really nothing different from what they just did over the last seven months and what they would be expected to do if they get an engineering job," said Winkelstein, a professor of bioengineering and neurosurgery.

At Penn last week, the top three designs from each of six engineering departments went head-to-head in a school-wide competition. A panel of alumni judges listened as teams of dark-suited students took to the stage of the Wu and Chen Auditorium in Levine Hall, presenting their findings and conducting demonstrations.

Among them were Joe Hill, Alex Neier, Joe Polin, and Justin Starr, the team that developed PubLock.

They built a prototype of a rugged, retractable chain lock that would be permanently attached to a bike rack; riders could open and close the lock with a card that uses radio-frequency I.D. technology.

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For engineering students, it's senior presentation time