Nerds Building Stuff!

Remember "Engineering Week" back in high school and college? They'd usually have some sort of neat demonstration, and there was ALWAYS a building competition (usually bridges of some sort). I never participated in school and recently got depressed when I realized that I'd never have another chance. Then came along GE.

GE celebrates "Engineering Week"
and has a building competition.

When I saw the posters up announcing the event I was stoked. I don't know if I was more excited to find out what we would be building, or to see how badly mine compared to everyone else's! After all, I'm a software engineer, and we have all sorts of mechanical and electrical engineers that can build any kind of contraption you can think of! Luckily they let us form into teams - ideally we'd have one of each type of engineer on a team to be able to tackle any sort of problem, but instead I joined a team with 2 other software engineers. We were determined to show up the other engineers!

Here are the basic rules we had for the competition:

• Our challenge was to build a wind powered vehicle that would transport a small plastic duck along a set course
• The vehicle could consist only of materials purchased at Wal-mart with a supplied $20 gift card
• Nothing can be donated to (or by) the team
• The vehicle must be wind-propelled (there were 3 fans along the course to power the vehicle - as shown below)
• No part of the vehicle may be left behind (i.e. no launching the duck)

The Course

At first our designs were WAY too complicated. We were going to do some sort of tricycle-sailboat-thing with the front axle attached to the sails which would turn the vehicle in whatever direction the wind was blowing. Then we remembered we only had a week to build, test, and compete so we turned to a more simplistic idea - what if we could put the duck inside some sort of ball? Then we'd just have to make sure it was big enough to catch the wind, and light enough to move really fast!

Here's what we made:

Meet pac-man

The duck fits right into his mouth for safe-keeping!

We wanted to do a bigger ball with lighter styrofoam, but when we looked online we found that a styrofoam ball around 12" to be about $65! So we had to go with this denser (but cheaper) nerf foam.

There were 10 different teams that competed in the challenge. I have video of all of the runs (each team was allowed 2 runs), but it was too messy to put them all up here. Instead I have the TOP 5 Building Competition Runs over at my TOP 5 blog if you are interested in checking them out. For now I'll show you our best run (we ended up taking 2nd place - we lost by 0.2 seconds) and the winning run. Sorry for the bad quality!

My Team - 2nd Place

1st Place run

Ironically the winners had a design that was actually pretty close to our original tricycle-sailboat idea; just without the movable axle. Unfortunately, in competitive times like these, there are no prizes for 2nd place, but we're already looking forward to next year's building competition to try for the coveted 1st place spot.