Making it work
Dal AC students nab top honours at national engineering competition
A team of students from Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Agriculture in Bible Hill has beaten the biggest and best universities in Canada at a national engineering competition.
Second year students Alex Place of Harmony, Alec McOnie of Truro, Nathaniel King of Vancouver and Patrick Wells of Stewiacke won the junior design challenge at the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), held this year in Calgary, March 5 to 8.
“It was surreal,” Place told the Truro Daily News after returning from the competition. “I remember that night I was talking to Nathaniel and he said, ‘We just won the CEC.’ It didn’t click with me right away.”
Wells also found it hard to process.
“It took a while to sink in,” he said. “I was thinking, did that just happen? It’s pretty amazing to think we won a Canada-wide competition.”
A team from Dalhousie Agriculture went to a robotics competition at the University of New Brunswick last year, but besides that no other Dal-AC students had ever participated in an engineering competition before – let alone come home with gold.
To qualify for the CEC, the Bible Hill students rst had to win or nish second at the Atlantic Engineering Competition, held in Moncton Feb. 4 and 5.
In Moncton the challenge was to build an amphibious
vehicle that would move up over a ramp and down into the water and oat.
Organizers put a pile of supplies on a table and each team had $200 to buy what they thought they needed.
“We knew right away the motors were too weak and too expensive,” said Place. “So we decided to use a mouse trap to propel our boat.”
e mouse trap worked by ipping the boat ahead but one trap wasn’t strong enough to send the boat all the way to the water. When the boys went to buy two more mousetraps, another team had already bought
them and taken them apart for the wood.
All the other teams used the motors but not one of them moved at all. Dalhousie’s boat meanwhile went half way up the ramp and when reset, went the rest of the way, landed in the water and oated.
After celebrating the Atlantic win, the young men were immediately concerned about how to pay for the trip to Calgary.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without help from the Dean’s o ce of the Faculty of Agriculture, the Department of Engineering at Dalhousie, the Dalhousie Agricultural Students’
Association, and PDI Engineering,” says Place. “We are very grateful.”
In Calgary, the challenge was to build a vehicle, a track for the vehicle, and the vehicle had to deliver a marble from one side of a Martian-like landscape to another.
e Dalhousie team had two innovative design ideas – one was to make their track from triangular pieces of cardboard which allowed them to create a smooth curving track. Other teams had sharp turns, which slowed their vehicles.
And Dalhousie’s other powerful idea was to launch the marble at the destination with inertia.
“Our method was just plain brute force. Other teams built catapults to throw their marble but for ours, we simply smashed the vehicle into the bottom of the track and the marble kept going,” said Wells.
e Dalhousie marble went significantly farther than any other marble but the team still wasn’t sure they had won as they were also marked on a presentation of their design to the judges.
Place says speaking in front of the judges, all senior engineers, was a great learning experience.
“You couldn’t fool these guys, if you didn’t know what you were talking about, they’d know. You had to know your stu ,” he said.
Wells says he enjoyed the opportunity to take everything they’ve been learning in school and to put it into an actual hands-on experience.
“Actually doing stu with your hands, building an iteration of your design, testing it and building a reiteration, that was the greatest part,” said Wells.