Caltech students learn new lesson in own humility
By Usha Sutliff
Staff Writer
PASADENA -- Caltech engineering students learned a bit about Murphy's
law -- if something can go wrong, it will -- as they matched wits and
designs in an annual contest Thursday.
During the two-hour competition, parts flew, devices crashed, got stuck
and sometimes just plain didn't work because of glitches in the power
system.
But the students rolled with the punches, some dancing or taking
pictures of the crowd with disposable cameras when they failed to get
points. Two teams faced off against each other at a time.
"Ah, at least we're being consistent this afternoon," quipped their
professor, Erik Antonsson, after one of the many rounds during which
neither team scored.
The 18 students in the Mechanical Engineering 72 class were handed a bag
of "junk" 10 weeks ago and broken into teams of two.
Each student had to design and perfect a machine that could work in
tandem with his or her partner's to attach cubes and cylinders to the
magnetized back wall of a Plexiglas box.
The higher they got the objects within a specified area, the more points
they got.
The materials they had to work with included ball bearings, wheels,
electric motors, pulleys, aluminum and brass tubing.
All good in theory, but when it came to show time in front of a packed
crowd at the college's Beckman Auditorium the lesson in open-ended
problem-solving also taught them about hard knocks.
In the end, it was senior Alec Muller and his teammate, junior Jason
Wong, who walked away with the prize -- a pie-shaped portion of a gear
from a large pump used in oil field equipment.
"It's nice, but it would have been even nicer if we had been able to see
all the other devices working the way they were working yesterday in
practice," Muller said. "Things go wrong and you can't predict them."
Wong said practice made perfect when it came to his device.
"Winning this thing is a dream," he added.
Their professor said the glitches throughout the contest kept a lot of
the students' hard work from being seen.
"Lots of things broke. Devices that had been working stopped working and
our power control system didn't work the way it was supposed to,"
Antonsson said.
But the next ME72 contest won't be a repeat performance, he added.
"We have some idea of what was causing the (power) troubles," he
said. "I think we have a pretty good handle on how to improve things for
next year ... So, we'll try again."
© 2000 MediaNews Group, Inc. and Los Angeles Newspaper Group, Inc.