Super Top Secret Spy Action by Bryan

So in hopes to show you more about what classes are like, over the next few weeks, I’ll be highlighting one of my classes in each entry.

This week, I’ll start off with one of my most popular classes, 2.007, Design and Manufacturing I.

The basic goal of the class is to design and build a car to complete a specific task or set of tasks and score as many points as possible.

Last year’s contest was modeled after Simmons Hall so students had to build cars that lifted these foam blocks that would be deposited in holes that looked like the windows in Simmons.

Did you know that the average Simmons room has at least nine windows?

Last year, my friend, Mark Cote, won the competition and he and a few of the other top scorers won a free trip to Japan to compete in an even larger design competition.

Maybe, I’ll win this year?

So to hear Professor Slocum tell it, each of us has an equally probable chance of winning because a lot of it comes down to chance.

So on to this year’s competition: “I have to f…antastically pass (IHTFP)”

Basically, the table this year has a set of bins of different sizes that represent grades ranging from A, B, C, and D. The table also has three different types of balls that range in point value as well, 1 graduate school ball, 8 engineering balls, and 20 humanities balls. The idea is to get as many of these balls into the highest scoring bins so you can get more points than your opponent and win and get to go to this year’s competition in Paris, or I think more realistically in my case is to learn a lot about the design process and what it takes to be a design engineer.

I’ll try to keep you all in the loop as the semester goes on and how my design evolves. The past two weeks have been dedicated to deciding what strategies we’re going to be using to win, but this week, we’ll be in the machine shop starting to build the basic platform for our car.

sweet!