Last Friday, the Engineering CTE invited surrounding schools to a competition designed to push their problem solving and STEM skills to the limit. The competition brings local engineers to create a challenge and judge the students’ final designs. This year’s prompt was to design a waterwheel that- when rotated- moved an attached pulley which pulled a toy car along a path. The competing schools- Lakeland, Western Wayne, Abington Heights, North Pocono, and Wallenpaupack- sent two teams of five students. The teams had four hours to build their design before the final test. The teams’ limited list of materials included everyday items such as thin sheets of wood, cardboard, duct tape, wooden dowels, plastic tubing, and an extremely valuable small tube of epoxy resin. However, one other major restriction was placed on the Wallenpaupack teams- their team was limited to only two level two students and three level one students compared to the teams of the other schools that had mostly seniors. This disparity was balanced out by the fact that Wallenpaupack is the only school with a true engineering program, giving Wallenpaupack’s students a slight advantage over the other teams.
As the competition began, the level three engineering students were tasked with running machinery for the competitors and giving advice and input when needed. In the four hours of building, one of the Wallenpaupack team’s table legs collapsed and one of the Western Wayne teams had to disassemble their whole build halfway through, fully encapsulating the true engineering experience of persevering past the unexpected. When the build time and eventual testing ended, one team had very clearly won from moving the toy car three feet compared to the next best team’s few inches each. Before the top three awards were given, the level three students were awarded five supplemental awards for certain qualities of the teams or designs. One of the Wallenpaupack teams was awarded the “U-Turn Award,” an award given to the team that had a critical failure- for them, their table falling- but were able to succeed despite it. Overall, the top three placers were Abington Heights team in first, a North Pocono team in second, and the same Wallenpaupack team that received the supplemental award in third.
