Caltech Students' Creations Clash in Design Contest
By Leon Drouin Keith
Associated Press
PASADENA, Calif. - The crowd was pumped at the California Institute of
Technology, cheering emphatically as the teams before them performed
stunts you won't see on any gridiron or diamond.
A handmade crane hopped and grabbed onto a metal bar, then released an
electric tentacle that twisted gracefully. Another vehicle tried bungee
jumping, while still others flew off plexiglass ledges and flipped and
crashed in pursuit of victory.
Caltech's 16th annual engineering design contest Thursday ignited the
imaginations of 18 juniors and seniors in a mechanical engineering
class, who were charged with creating remote-controlled devices to haul
cubes and cylinders with magnets and stick them to a steel-backed
wall.
Teams of two students each used joysticks to operate their creations,
which they had 10 weeks to create using only a "bag of junk" that
contained aluminum, plexiglass, pulleys, rollers and other items.
A sports-like atmosphere reigned at Beckman Auditorium, where banners
such as "Go Steve and Jay 72 'Word is Born"' urged on competitors.
"Don't screw up, Todd!" somebody shouted as Todd Schuman readied his
machine, which relied on an arm designed to swing up after grasping an
object and swing down to place it on one of four scoring areas of the
wall. But the magnets just wouldn't stick.
"It's a trade-off," Schuman said after the competition. "If you make it
with a really powerful magnet, when you try to put it on the wall it's
not going to want to come off."
Susan Sher's vehicle was intended to fall to the bottom of a three-level
box, then deliver objects to Tory Sturgeon's crane. The designs "worked
beautifully in theory," Sturgeon said, but the reality for her team, and
most of the others, was tangled lines and spinning wheels.
The final round pitted the two biggest crowd-pleasers: the hopping crane
with snakelike extension built by Steve Schell and a low, treaded
vehicle by Jason Wong that was the simplest-looking vehicle of the
bunch.
Simple won. Wong's creation pushed a cube against the wall and nudged it
upward into a scoring area, while Schell's fell just an inch or two
short of getting the block to stick.
Complexity usually loses to simplicity in the competition, which focuses
on a different task every year, said mechanical engineering professor
Erik Antonsson. But all the students gain important experience in the
"superheated microcosm" of the event, which more than 1,000 people
watched, he said.
And although the students' future creations may not be for cheering
crowds, "all design work is competitive," Antonsson said. "Strong
designs make better products."
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