IRVINE : Just Plane Fun for UCI Students

Forget aerodynamics and four years of college engineering classes. To win a paper airplane contest Monday, UC Irvine mechanical engineering student Pratik Patel used the same kind of plane he folded while goofing off in grammar school.

“I’ve been doing this since elementary school, the same design,” said Patel, 21.

After his plane glided from the balcony of UCI’s engineering building and landed 10 seconds later on the concrete plaza one story below, Patel yelled and thrust his arms into the air. Out of 23 entries, he had beaten the next best by a second.

It was the beginning of UCI’s 19th annual Engineering Week. The event was ushered in with the airplane toss and other competitions to build the strongest Popsicle-stick bridge and the highest tower using a sheet of notebook paper and a foot of Scotch tape.

Engineering Week gives future designers the chance to enjoy themselves and lampoon their image as pasty, professorial types with pocket-protectors and calculator cases dangling from their belts.

The events continue today with a tug of war, a calculator toss and a Rube Goldberg contest to see who can build the most complex device possible to perform a simple task.

Wednesday’s events include a 1 p.m. nerd contest, which is often considered the highlight of the week. Students try to outdo each other with unzipped flies, untucked white shirttails dangling from polyester pants and the requisite black horned-rim glasses held together with tape.

Although Patel won the paper airplane contest with a pre-collegiate design, the shape of his airplane--a chunky delta wing model with a blunt nose--employed aerodynamic theories in its glide through the warm air.

“You’re trying to get it as fat as possible to keep it in the air longer,” said Mike Becker, 21, a senior mechanical engineering student who skipped his class on composite materials to compete with his own design. “If the contest was to build a plane for distance, it would be the other way around. You would want a longer, sleeker design.”

There were also engineering theories behind Monday’s paper tower contest.

The secret to building a tall paper structure is in “bending moments,” said Don Baskin, president of the UCI chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Roughly translated, Baskin said, that means a folded piece of paper is stronger than a straight piece.

Contestants in the tower contest were given one sheet of notebook paper, about a foot of Scotch tape, a pair of scissors and 40 minutes to build the tallest structure possible. The winning entry, built and designed by Andy Tse-Hung Wu, a junior in civil engineering, stood 5 feet, 10 inches tall.

“I stayed up till 2 o’clock last night to figure this out,” said Wu, 22, whose tower looked like a tiny A-frame house with a skinny chimney sticking out of the center.

His ingenious design to build a stable base while leaving enough paper to reach the winning height earned Wu a Sony Walkman and praise from fellow designers.

“That’s a cool one,” said freshman Jason Chikami, 18, whose own tower reached 5 feet, 2 inches. “It’s very simple. I never would have thought of it.”