PASADENA, Calif. -- The gnashing of teeth, the smell of bearings burned, the grinding of egos--it's that time of year again at the California Institute of Technology for the ever competitive, ever popular ME 72 Engineering Design Contest.
Ever popular, that is, unless you're one of the 23 members of the ME 72 class, who were handed a bag of parts in September, and since then have been laboring to build a machine that fits the design constraints set by instructors Curtis Collins, a lecturer in mechanical engineering, and Joel Burdick, a professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering. The class culminates with a public competition; this year's event--the nineteenth--is called "Cage Against the Machine," and will take place Thursday, December 4, at 2 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus.
While the contest is open to the Caltech community, unfortunately the general public is not invited due to limited seating and the expected large campus turnout. The media, however, are invited to attend and cover the event, which should last about 90 minutes.
The object of this year's contest is to design and build a device that, in collaboration with a teammate's device, will move a cage from the center of a six-and-a-half-foot-square table to a scoring zone. All of the devices must be built from the same bag of parts, which, along with obvious parts like springs, gears, and bushings, oddly includes one brass cup hook and two gallon-size resealable bags. Working together, each team must thwart the efforts of the opposing team.
The devices are guided wirelessly by a radio-controlled joystick, and there are rules--for example, it is permissible for a device to fall off the table, thereby committing the mechanical equivalent of suicide for the good of the team. And launching a projectile is allowed, but only if it is tethered (presumably to avoid taking out an audience member's eye), and only if it uses ten joules of energy or less (a joule, of course, is a unit of work or energy equal to the work done by a force of one newton acting through a distance of one meter).
The goal is not necessarily to win the competition, but to learn a little something about engineering design. Collins notes that, as in the past, this year's students will invest about 150 hours in building their machines. "Students gain a deep understanding of the connection between design and implementation," he says. "Having good ideas is just the beginning; it takes long hours of fabrication and testing to make everything work."
That's not to suggest, though, that the 9 women and 14 men don't want to win. They do. In fact, in the rules for the contest, the instructors include this cautionary note:
"While a certain level of competitiveness is valuable, and even beneficial, too much can clearly create problems. The spirit of the class is to focus on learning how to be a better engineering designer, not to win at all costs. Your grade is . . . independent of your device's actual performance in the contest. . . . Don't take the contest so seriously that you become distraught when you lose."
MEDIA ACCESS: The contest is open to the news media. Media will have special seating in the front of the auditorium. To ensure that the hundreds of students, faculty, and staff have a clear view of the contest, we ask that the media not stand on or in front of the stage.