‘Titanium’ wins first place in Student Engineering Competition

More than 100 Rice students competed Feb. 20 in the Rice Global Engineering and Construction Forum’s 2013 Student Engineering Competition. The annual event coincides with National Engineers’ Week and challenges students to work in teams to solve an engineering problem using common office materials. Sponsors included the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the Rice Global Engineering and Construction Forum and Fluor Corp.

The Student Engineering Competition required solving an engineering problem with common office supplies. (Photo by Donald Soward)

In this year’s competition, “Snow to Peaks,” students were given two hours and 13 pages of rules and instructions. Their task: Move “snow” – small polystyrene balls – from one part of a mountain (i.e., a table top) to a ski “slope” (i.e., a cardboard box at the other end of the table). Building materials included four pencils, 20 sheets of paper, thread, a roll of tape, two paper coffee cups, two disc-shaped magnets, tacks and paper clips.

The top five teams won gift cards. They were:

• First place: “Titanium” — Edgar Silva, Austin Woo and Momona Yamagami.
• Second place: “Dennis Frogman” — Amiri Boylan, Andrew Duberg, Rucker Simon and Thomas Scuseria.
• Third place: “Rebuttal” — Gabriel Breternitz, Ben Fisher, Maurice Harari and Stephen Yan.
• Fourth place: “Team Rocket” — Kevin Cheng, Sunny Kim, Jonathan Ou and Benjamin Weis.
• Fifth place: “Caged Power” — Archit Chaba, Kelly Sanders and Zach Scott.