Structured around an alarmingly steep Winter Olympics style slope, students were asked to create a robot that could ascend and descend the incline without succumbing to gravity’s forces, or being flipped over on their descent.
Equipped with a standard materials kit that includes motors, pulleys, fasteners and metal and plastic stock, students are expected to design and build a working robot. Using lathes, water jets, electronic controllers and RC systems, students iterate their designs until they reach a product they feel will win the competition.
While there were a number of ingenious designs entered into the competition, Clare Zhang’s robot took the competition’s highest honor. According to MIT, “[O]ther students produced robots that performed added point-earning tasks — such as grabbing a gold medal, pushing a lever, or knocking over “trees” on the slope — Zhang’s approach was to zoom straight up the steepest (and highest-scoring) of three hills, and then back down again, as many times as possible, racking up points each time.”
Although winning the 2.007 competition is certainly a feather in any young engineers cap, the real victory comes from learning the skills required to manage a complex project and deliver results.
While engineering is sometimes seen as a rigorous, difficult and intimidating field, competitions like MIT’s are perfect examples of why engineering is ultimately a creative and exciting pursuit. Hopefully more educators will begin working these types of activities into their semester coursework and offer students more opportunities to learn design through practice.
Image and Video Courtesy of MIT