Students Foiled by Boats Weighted With Cents

To the mathematical mind of an engineering student, a roll of aluminum foil and a metal bowl can suggest something grander than a place to store leftovers.

Fill the bowl with water, fashion the foil into a boat, set it afloat and see how many pennies it will hold before it sinks. That was the challenge accepted by a dozen students at Cal State Northridge on Monday as they kicked off National Engineers Week.

Each entrant was given a stack of damp pennies and a 5- by 10-inch rectangle of aluminum foil--50 square inches, in engineerspeak.

Simple words of wisdom came from the reigning champion, Theresa Bell, a senior who scooped nearly 300 pennies into her vessel in 1989, which was the last time the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers sponsored the competition.

“You can get pretty with a boat, but that’s not going to hold pennies,” she said.

Bell’s 1991 entry, more barge than boat, held only 132 pennies. The reduced cargo capacity, others observed, was not due to her design or her careful placement of Lincoln’s likenesses.

“It was really heavy-duty foil last time,” said Andrew Delgatto, 22, who placed second in 1989.

On Monday, Delgatto, a senior in mechanical engineering, huddled in a corner with George Catedral, a junior industrial engineering student. Catedral was scribbling equations and drawings of foil boat prototypes onto green graph paper, all the while consulting a thick textbook entitled “Physics for Scientists and Engineers.”

Should there be a pocket of air in the middle? How low should the side walls be to maximize the surface area? Where should the first pennies be placed to improve balance? They pondered these and other weighty questions.

Once their turn came, however, such intellectual discourse degenerated to sighs, grunts and gestures.

“Over here, here, not there, there,” Catedral coached as Delgatto slid the pennies into their raft-shaped boat, which they likened to a battleship. “Just don’t TOUCH it!”

But the decision to lower the walls proved a bad one. The battleship held only 115 pennies when it crumpled and sank to the bottom of the bowl.

In the end, the lesson learned Monday was a hard one: Neither experience nor preparation count. Two freshmen who haven’t even decided what area of engineering they want to pursue dropped by and fashioned a boat that beat Bell’s by 3 cents.

As a television reporter wearing a purple tie thrust a microphone into the blushing faces of Richard Gomez, 18, and Blanca Rulas, 19, they fumbled for words to explain their victory.

“I guess I learned something,” Gomez said, haltingly. “You have to put the pennies in very slowly.”