Pasadena : Caltech Design Contest Set

The fourth annual Caltech Engineering Design Contest will take place next Thursday.

Dr. Erik Antonsson’s mechanical engineering class will compete in a double-elimination tournament in which students are given “a bag of junk” to be used as raw materials in the contest.

About 24 students, mostly juniors, receive identical sets of materials to build machines. They must fashion assorted pieces of plexiglass, aluminum, tubing, springs, rubber bands, paper clips, two small electric motors and other materials into a Ping-Pong ball-collecting machine. They can use only the materials supplied to build their machines.

In the contest--which ends the two-month-long design and construction process--two machines face off on a table with an irregular surface and a trough of Ping-Pong balls in the center. Students and machines then vie to collect as many Ping-Pong balls from the trough in a 30-second period.

Students have been working on their projects since the beginning of class Oct. 1. Eighty percent of the students’ class grade depends on the design and performance of their machines in the contest.

About half of their grade on the project is based on performance in the contest. The other half is based on imagination and the demonstration of engineering principles.