Just a Bunch of Rubes? Engineering Students Let Their Imaginations Fly

When Sung-Jen Wang tells people he’s a mechanical engineering major, he said they assume he’s one of those boring, study-all-the-time bookworms.

“They think of engineers as people sitting behind desks punching calculators,” said Wang, 22, of Irvine. “But it’s actually about building things and it’s very, very fun.”

Wang is among 2,500 students at UC Irvine’s School of Engineering getting the chance to shed that study-geek image during E-Week, the university’s 24th annual weeklong celebration of engineering, which is also being held in conjunction with National Engineering Week.

But festivities don’t include lectures with guest speakers or group study sessions in the library. In fact, some engineering students aren’t getting much studying done at all. And a handful are even skipping classes.

This is a celebration that calls for playing games and building wacky contraptions to illustrate how engineering plays a role in everyday life.

On Tuesday, students gathered outside Engineering Plaza to demonstrate their handmade mechanical devices. Wang and three of his friends pulled an all-nighter Monday building a page-turning device called “Trilogy.”

It was constructed of plywood, Legos and required a toy ambulance truck, balloons and a water gun for operation. Strange, yes, but it worked. Students watching the demonstration clapped when the device was set in motion and turned the page of a “Star Wars” book.

“How did we come up with something so wild? Well, we thought of the idea at 3 a.m.” said Jim Luebke, 20, of Irvine, an aerospace engineering major who worked on Wang’s team. “And we weren’t even drunk.”

Other students on Tuesday showed off their “tightrope flyers”--lightweight, self-propelled vehicles--in a contest held outside the engineering building. The challenge was to see which flyer could move the fastest along a 30-meter rope suspended four feet above the ground.

Among the events scheduled for the rest of the week are a rubber-band-powered boat race, and an egg drop in which students must design a protective package without using Styrofoam, fill it with eggs and drop it from the campus Engineering Tower. The package with the highest number of surviving eggs wins.

There is also a competition to build the tallest tower using straws, and a penny floating contest in which participants must see who can build an aluminum boat and load it down with the most pennies--without sinking the homemade vessel.

Most entrants said their mechanical “whatchamacallits” took many hours to build, but in the end, it was well worth the hard work.

“In class, we get to do design projects and build control systems, but nothing this much fun,” said Dan Hamman, 20, of Irvine, a mechanical engineering major.

Administrators said the purpose of the event also is show students of other disciplines what it is that engineering students do.

“The students indirectly wish to pass a message that engineering is with them everywhere, everyday,” said Nicolaos G. Alexopoulos, dean of UC Irvine’s School of Engineering. “Everyone enjoys the conveniences technology provides.

“Technology is essentially permeating all of our lives and the creativity and hard work of engineers is what produces all the wonderful things that make our lives more comfortable . . . the computers that are smaller, faster and cheaper and better, stronger, lighter materials.”