Kaiser Tam

University of Toronto Engineering Kompetitions

Now, you may be wondering, what is UTEK? Well, UTEK is the largest and oldest engineering competition at UofT. At UTEK, engineering students can apply their engineering skills in a practical situation, as they work in teams to tackle a prompt based off a given theme within a given time frame.

For more information, feel free to check out the UTEK website, as there is a lot of great information about UTEK there!
2025: Director

For the 2025/2026 school year, I am blessed to be the UTEK Director. When I started this role, I could not imagine myself as the Director of such a large operation. However, through a lot of hard work and learning, I am confident that UTEK 25/26 will be the best iteration of UTEK to come! This year’s theme is Universal Access: Rethinking Healthcare, and I can’t wait to present our various competition!

Last year, there was a lot of things that were done really well. First of all, UTEK increased its participant count by over 100 students last year. The UofT team also managed to win the Re-Engineering competition category at the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC). However, there was still room for improvement. For example, the day of was quite hectic last year. I also noticed that other competition categories were not as fleshed out. This year, I tried to bring back as many people as possible to return to UTEK for another year. One thing I stress any team I join is the flow of knowledge. When someone moves on to another role, it is important for knowledge to be passed down, whether through documentation, processes, or word of mouth, so that the next group of students can build upon the hard work that has been put into a project. For every role on the team, I wanted to make sure that all incoming members had someone else on the team they could ask anything to. This would help with the flow of information throughout the team and make sure everyone knew what was going on at all times.

As Director, some of the initiatives I wish to implement are:

  • Bringing back the Debate and Innovative Design competitions (Parliamentary Debate will return this year! Innovative Design will most likely return for UTEK 2026/2027).
  • Preparing the UTEK team to transition from a January event to a November event, moving our timeline up by 3 months (This year, the UTEK team will have all deliverables ready by mid-November, meeting this goal!)
  • Increasing UTEK participation from 340 to 450 (Tickets are coming soon!)
  • Having workshops to introduce incoming first years to the various UTEK competition categories. This has been implemented, as we will be hosting 2 Consulting/Parliamentary Debate workshops, and a Bio-Engineering Workshop in collaboration with Engineers without Borders (EWB).
  • Hosting training for the Kompetition Directors and for UTEK winners to prepare them for OEC (This is currently in the works!).
  • Having official scouting roles and responsibilities for observers at OEC so that future UTEK executives can make improvements to make their competitions stronger and more organized.
  • Securing marketing materials for the next 3 years through Special Projects funding (this has been completed!)
  • Improving on the merch and swag provided at UTEK 2025/2026 (I think the designs for this year are amazing!)
  • Updating the website to provide a cleaner look!

and much more! UTEK 2026 is taking place on January 10-11th, 2026, so make sure to get your tickets!

2024: Junior Design Director
This year, my friend (Justin Fang) and I are working as Junior Design Directors for this year’s UTEK competition. The winners of this competition will go to OEC 2025, which will be hosted at McMaster University. There were several changes that we wanted to make to this year’s UTEK. One change was with the rubric. For this year’s UTEK, we made the judging criteria more specific so that participants will have a better understanding of what they did well, and what they did not do as well. Furthermore, we also decided to do a lot of documentation to ensure that future Junior Design directors have a great starting point for creating their competitor and judges packages.
Justin and I have finished our prototyping and prep for UTEK 2025. The competitors package, judges package, and competition handbook are all complete, and we have created several prototypes so that when we run the event, everything goes smoothly. We can not wait for UTEK 2025 to commence! If you are a current first or second year engineering student at UofT, make sure to check out UTEK 2025!

For the 2024-2025 school term, Justin and I directed Junior Design for UTEK. The prompt for UTEK 2024 (which got pushed to 2025 due to room scheduling conflicts) was very similar to the prompt for OEC 2024. During OEC, Justin and I were surprised by the steep increase in difficulty between UTEK and OEC. By using a tried and testing prompt from OEC 2024, it was easier to ensure that whoever UofT sent to OEC would be prepared for the challenge and would represent UofT well. The following images are from the day of the event.

When I competed in UTEK in 2023, there was 18 teams competing in the Junior Design Kompetition. In 2024, our team managed to increase the Junior Design Kompetition to a whopping 51 teams!!! That’s pretty much tripling the number of teams that competed at UTEK, which I am beyond happy with. I want to extend my thanks to the entire UTEK team for helping make this year’s UTEK the best one ever! The organizing team did an amazing job with marketing UTEK to UofT students, and this amazing event would not have been possible without them!

2023: Junior Design Participant

When I was in my first year at UofT, I was introduced to the UofT Engineering Kompetition (UTEK, and yes, it is spelt with a ‘K’) through a friend. After competing in the Junior Design competition and winning the event, I am working as the Junior Design Director for UTEK 2025!

I first heard about UTEK in my APS111 class, where students who competed in the Junior Design event would receive bonus marks in the course. At first, I was not feeling like participating in UTEK. However, after some convincing from my friends, I decided that competing in UTEK would not be a bad idea. Little did I know that our team would win the Junior Design competition for UTEK 2023. Sometimes we do not start projects out of fear. “What if things do not work out?” “What if I am not ready yet?” “What if I fail?” However, I have come to learn that I would rather fail trying than live thinking about what-if’s.
During the competition, our team created The Wheel, which is a prototype for a wind-powered vehicle that can traverse various terrains. We also presented this design to a panel of judges to explain our thought process and convey creativity. Our team followed an idea generation process taught during our APS111 course, where we identified functions, objectives, and constraints, and then narrowed down a list of solutions using various idea selection methods.
For this project, we made sure to clearly define our project requirements. This allowed us to have a solid understanding to what the scope of our project was, and what would be inside and outside of the scope. Additionally, we made sure that when we were doing our idea generation, we fully explored the design space, as it would be easy to just pick a car design for a challenge like this. Our team wanted to demonstrate not only just our extensive work going through the design process, but our creativity and our passion for engineering. We wanted to have a lot of fun with this project, and I hope that our excitement translated into a better design as well. Shout out to Professor Benjamin Kinsella for his advice and help throughout the whole process.
Ultimately, our team won the Junior Design division at UTEK, so that meant that we got to go to the Ontario Engineering Competition, OEC. At OEC, we did a similar style competition, and we placed 3rd. We tried to follow use a similar design process and create a unique design again to impress the judges.