Engineering Olympics Ideas

[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.