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Mousetraps and Rubber Bands

When designing their entry into this year’s “Mousetraps and Rubber Bands” competition, Eyan Goldman, Justin Kim, and Arion Mordeshian kept reminding each other of famous German industrial engineer Dieter Rams’ “10 Principles of Good Design.”

“Rams’ basic message was: Good design is simple; it’s as little design as possible. Less is better. So that is what we tried to do,” said Kim.

It worked.

On Wednesday afternoon in Shriver Hall, Team Rams (named for that inspiring German engineer and not for the Los Angeles NFL franchise) beat out 14 other teams comprising 43 freshman mechanical engineering majors to take top honors in “Mousetraps and Rubber Bands,” the final assignment in their Freshman Experiences in Mechanical Engineering course.

This fun but fierce competition has become something of an annual rite-of-passage, challenging teams to use two mousetraps, three rubber bands and $15 worth of approved materials to design and construct a small vehicle that performs a certain task that changes year to year.

This year’s task— “Bye Bye Blue Jay”—challenged students to build two-part gizmos with timing mechanisms that, on command, would launch a Blue Jay Beanie Baby off an elevated, upward sloping ramp and as far as possible across the Shriver Hall stage. Some teams riffed on the theme in their names— Jaywalkers, Merry Blue Jays, and Nested Loops—among them.

According to Steven Marra, associate teaching professor, instructor for the course, and mastermind behind each year's challenge, the task teaches students about design approaches, potential and kinetic energy and friction, prototyping methods and much more.

“It also teaches them time-management skills, teamwork skills and how to use various simple tools,” he says. “They also learn, if they didn’t know it already, that things usually take a lot longer to accomplish than expected, that things rarely work out right the first time, and that design is an iterative process.”

It sure was. The devices that took the stage at this week’s competition were markedly different, for most teams (including the Rams), than the designs they started with in early November.

“We started out with a 9-foot tall ramp, but found out that would not be allowed in the competition,” Goldman. “So we started again.”

Team Rams’ winning design used a “sling shot” approach, which launched the Beanie Baby nested in a clear plastic hamster exercise ball clear across the Shriver Hall, sometimes sending onlookers scrambling to get out of the way.

“I thought all the teams did a great job; I was very impressed,” Marra says.

Transcription for Freshman Mechanical Engineering Design Competition video:

[upbeat music]

[Team Ram Member] Famous engineer and product designer wrote "good design is as little design as possible".

[Steven Marra] We have used mouse traps and rubber bands to launch different types of projectiles. But this was the first year where we really give them a timing constraint.

Each team starts on the platform. Their launching device and vehicle must be within a rectangle at the back of the platform, at the start of each match.

Once the start command is given...

[Steven Marra] Get set, go!

...they activate their launching device but it has to wait at least five seconds and no more than 30 before it will launch the vehicle.

[Steven Marra] 5 seconds.

When it does this, the vehicle will have the blue jay in it, it will launch it across the platform, up the ramp. And they'll learn what fails when doing design work.

[students groan]

The winner of each match is determined by where each blue jay comes to rest.

[students cheer]

[Team Rams Member] Good design is as little design as possible and we tried to embody that philosophy in our design by making as few moving components, as simple a set up as possible,
and as durable and reliable as possible as well.

[students laughing and murmuring]

[students cheering]

[music ends]

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