On March 8, 2024, Caltech students were eagerly competing for the ME 72 competition trophy, which would crown them as winners of the ME 72 design project. Alongside members of the Caltech community, news and surrounding Pasadena members watched the students compete.
ME 72, the Mechanical Engineering Design Laboratory class, is the capstone project design class for mechanical engineering students (the MechEs). Each year, the Teaching Assistants, students, and often winners of the previous year’s competition, design a competition tournament for the next year’s class to partake in. Last year, robots went through an obstacle course on Beckman Mall, trying to score the most points by shooting balls through hoops as fast as possible.
This year, the competition was called “Airship Quadball.” Each team chose a name and built three blimps, powered by rotating fans and remote-controlled by the competing students, to move the blimps around the gym “field.” With two teams being pitted against each other at a time, each team tried to gather as many balloons in nets attached to the blimps and push them through the suspended goals of the opposite team to score points. The blimps flew through Brown Gym in 5-minute matches first in a Round Robin and then in an elimination tournament to win the trophy.
I was not involved with the building of any robots. However, I greatly enjoyed watching all the blimps fly around. Also, chatting with the engineers was really exciting! The amount of effort and work all of the students put in to make these blimps was undeniable. All ME 72 students are juniors and seniors, and the class is a capstone, or class demonstrating all the concepts that the students learn, for a reason. It truly stretches the boundaries of what you might expect students could accomplish in two terms, and all students exceed those boundaries to create truly remarkable final products. Talking to my friends who took the class before or were in it now, it was definitely one of their favorites.
Such design classes are not unique to Caltech, but here, students receive significant resources for these courses. Numerous other Caltech courses, especially within Mechanical Engineering, involve the building of hands-on creations. For instance, ME/CS/EE 134, Robotic Systems, has student groups build robots that can autonomously do a task or play a game. Some of the example robots could lay down train tracks or play a beer-less version of Beer Pong, Stack Cup, Poker, Backgammon, and more. Members of the Caltech community, similar to ME 72, were invited to watch the robot demos and ask the engineers questions about their robots.
ME 72 and all of the different class demonstrations are exciting and interesting to see from the outside perspective. Students put in extraordinary effort that results in amazing final products, and the students are all clearly proud of their accomplishments. These project classes show the talent and dedication of many Caltech students.
