Engineering Olympics Ideas

[Bpk9p4]

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas for Engineering Olympics games. I am wanting to do quick competitions within are team to get the kids thinking and working together. They will need to be low cost and take less then 30 min.

One example is. Make the longest cantilever bridge with 3 sheets of paper and a role of tape.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[James Tonthat]

We did something similar except it was unlimited paper and unlimited tape, about the same time constraint. The problem was tallest tower that can support a statics textbook (you could substitute a physics text book.) If it couldn't support the textbook, it was DQ'd.

[IKE]

Tallest structre using paper and tape works well.

The marshmallow spaghetti towers are often a hit. There is also a neat video about them.
http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html

This video would be fun to watch after the challenge, plus it re-inforces a JVN approved principle (iteration is important).

[Bpk9p4]

I like the touch of the statics book. i will have to use that idea thanks

[Celia]

One fun idea is to build a "roller coaster" of sorts out of paper, tape, and pipe cleaners. Have participants construct a track to tape to the wall for a ping pong ball to run down. You can decide different challenges, like requiring two jumps and five "thrills". The ball must safely harbored at the end in order to be considered. Maybe give fifteen minutes.

Another is to build a car out of cardboard, small wooden discs, and chopsticks (axles). Participants roll the car down an incline, the goal being to land it in a defined area. Like a bulls eye, the prime target is worth the most points, and the further away from the middle, the less points earned. Again, takes about fifteen minutes.

I confess, both ideas were taken from the Women in Engineering Summer Youth Program at Michigan Tech. Feel free to PM me if you want a more detailed explanation/clarification or pictures of either events.

[efoote868]

When I was interviewing, one company had a similar idea going, but with a twist.

There were 4 events you had to compete in, with an overall time limit. There was a paper airplane event, a bridge building event, a tower building event, and a catapult event.

Each team received an hour (substitute with your own time limit) to compete in all the events, and a kit of parts. Whatever your team used in the kit of parts for an event had to be forfeited, you couldn't reuse parts. So if you used all your Popsicle sticks in the bridge, you couldn't use them again in the tower.


From memory, items in the kit of parts were:
-1 yard of tape
-40ish Popsicle sticks
-50ish drinking straws
-1 foot of string
-20ish paper clips
-5 sheets of paper
-10 rubber bands
-1 sheet of card board
-1 poster board
-10 index cards


Goals for each event as follows:
Bridge - Longest span that holds 5lbs wins.
Catapult - Best of 3 ping pong ball shots, furthest shot wins.
Tower - Tallest free standing for 1 minute wins.
Plane - Best of 3 throws, furthest throw wins.

There were other rules for the events, such as the tower had to be fixed (but not taped) to the poster board and couldn't be held. Overall scoring was that teams in each event were ranked, and points for each event were assigned based on rank. Highest overall score won.


I suppose other ideas you could have include an egg drop (highest still intact), parachute (longest time afloat), mouse-trap vehicle (furthest or most accurate), boat (most supported weight).

[George C]

McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario hosts an annual Engineering and Science Olympics. This link http://olympics.mcmaster.ca/about/competitions.php takes you to the 2013 competition which lists several events. A google search for McMaster Engineering Olympics will give several more hits. It's a well-run event.

[Marc P.]

Each year Yale University also runs a Physics Olympics. Some of their challenges from previous years are posted on their website:

Click on the "Events" For each year, there are links to PDFs explaining some of the challenges and requirements.

http://ypo.sites.yale.edu/

[Bpk9p4]

IKE thanks a lot for the idea and the video. This is perfect for FIRST. i did this with my team last night and it was a giant hit

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Bpk9p4

IKE thanks a lot for the idea and the video. This is perfect for FIRST. i did this with my team last night and it was a giant hit

Glad it worked out well. I also enjoy a lot of the projects that the PBS Design Squad show does:
http://pbskids.org/designsquad/build/

While the target audience is a bit younger than FRC, this build projects work well for shorter durations for older kids.

We used to do a lot of these, but the tasks often required too long for the students to complete and ate up too much time/mentor effort to do them properly. (We did bottle rockets, mousetrap cars, catapults, putting machines, rubber band powered cars, egg drop....)

Keeping them short, sweet, but informative is a real trick.

One I always wanted to do, but never have would be during the spring picnic, I wanted to do ICE-Cream towers. Start with 1 gallon of icecream. Tallest Tower at the end of a 20 minute period...

[Mike Schreiber]

Tallest news paper, electrical tape, popsicle stick, straw tower holding a 1 kg mass is fun, I've seen them get up to 8ft (height limited by what they could reach standing on a chair)

As mentioned before mouse trap car is always a cool one. There's a bunch of variants on it. It's a good way to transition into an engineering lesson on wheel size and acceleration too.

Kettering University does these types of things weekly with students during lunch and gives prizes, they post most of them online, but I can't seem to find them, I'll edit if I come across any particularly cool ones.