Tech Challenge

Volunteered at the Tech Challenge today, representing Cisco (woo presenting sponsor!), although I kinda wish in retrospect that I'd signed up for judging cause a lot of the projects that the kids brought in were pretty interesting.

The challenge was to develop a device to rescue a stranded civilian (aka toy) from an unstable bridge that had just broken apart due to an earthquake and bring it back to safety. Remote robotic cars, or a bulldozer in one case, seemed to be a popular trend (some controlled by laptop!), with some teams going for a trap-like mechanism to pull the survivor into the vehicle and others opting for a mini-remote vehicle that would push the toy into the bigger vehicle. In one case the latter vehicle was unwieldy enough to almost fall over into the "ocean" a couple of times.

A few groups opted for something like a wheel that would traverse the top of the bridge (in one case operated by a complex pulley system... really cool) and drop a line to hook the toy, like an air rescue. One went for an actual remote-control helicopter in that fashion.

And then the others I didn't quite get: a crane remotely operated via a string that fell over every time the string was actually pulled; a hook thrown across the bridge like a lasso that kept missing and getting entangled in the bridge itself; a slingshot that won "most spectacular failure" in the middle school group; and a laser guided crossbow? And I only got to see a handful of all the groups that went up anyway due to my volunteer duties in the other room; it would've been interesting to see what the high schoolers came up with.

Instead, I managed the handing out of t-shirts in a ~90 degree room thanks to the sun roof (perfect day to make the volunteer shirts black!...) and the entrance that got turned into an exit midway into the competition... which wasn't helped by the fact that the sign indicating that it was an exit was crafted from the side of a cardboard box and written over in permanent marker like a homeless person's sign. nor by the fact that other volunteers flaunting their "all access" passes/parents looking for lost children or phones or cameras or the other exit/people complaining about the wait at the actual entrance would just force their way through anyway. Sigh.

Anyway, the whole setup with the bridge seemed like a pretty straightforward challenge for grade-schoolers to address, which makes next year's challenge seem really out there in comparison. Apparently the kids'll have to come up with a device to glean information from a neighboring comet. I have no idea how they're going to test that. O_o