Netting a Victory in Battle of the Brains

Amid the screaming students at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Thursday, Scott DeWinter was deadly calm.

When the 22-year-old mechanical engineering major took the stage at the 11th annual Mechanical Engineering Design Contest, he had only two things with him: a gizmo full of Ping-Pong balls and an intense desire to win.

In black jeans and a crew cut, DeWinter stood casually chewing gum and manipulating a joystick, ordering his machine to push opponents aside, smash them into a ditch and dump more than 200 balls into an opposing drain.

When it was over, DeWinter had beat out 31 other mechanical engineering seniors in Prof. Erik Antonsson’s ME72 class for the coveted Engineering Design Contest award Thursday.

A staple on Antonsson’s syllabus, the annual contest pits future mechanical engineers against each other in a race to create the fastest, most effective gadget out of a “bag of junk,” Antonsson said.

At the start of the term, each student receives an identical bag of random objects such as pieces of Masonite, Plexiglass, ball bearings and Venetian blinds. For nine weeks, the class assignment is to use those objects to design and build a machine that could dump the most Ping-Pong balls into a drain.

Machines were pitted head to head in randomly matched rounds, and defense was an important part of the design. Each student worked furiously to prevent the others from attaining their goal.

Some of the defenses were elaborate: jutting arms and pop-up plugs that blocked the balls from entering the drain. But the two machines that made it to the last round were both heavy, bare-boned boxes that could carry 200 balls and plow their opponents into ditches on the indoor playing table with all the subtlety of an armored tank.

The contest was not a final examination, but just a chance for Antonsson’s students “to show off all the work and struggle these students put into their designs,” he said.

The professor also said the contest aims to “provide students with a real-world opportunity to learn about the solution to open-ended problems.”

But when DeWinter and his final opponent, Amir Alagheband, revved up their handcrafted, motor-powered ball-depositing machines, the problems were clearly defined: how to get one big box to pin the other big box to the wall, while dumping a load of balls into a hole in 35 seconds.

“I’m one of the least competitive people I know,” said DeWinter, who spent an average of 30 hours a week building his tank. “But in this, I wanted to win. It seemed like it mattered.”

The contest seemed to matter to a lot of students. Antonsson said there were more than 60 students on the waiting list for the class this year.

And Thursday the auditorium was filled with more than 100 screaming fans, who sat on the edges of their seats for the event.

DeWinter was favored to win from the beginning because he was one of the first students in the class to design and assemble a working machine.

“I designed it the first weekend,” DeWinter said. “And I only made slight changes to it as the term progressed.”

His preparation--and his cool demeanor--made DeWinter one of the most intimidating contestants Thursday.

During the intermission before the semifinals, one of DeWinter’s classmates presented him with an award for the Most Intimidating Design: a $20 gift certificate to what DeWinter--snarlingly--described as “the worst restaurant in town.”