Catapults let fly in engineering test
- Font Size:
- Default font size
- Larger font size
By Tom Saul | Saturday, February 16, 2008 |
John Schultz/Quad-City Times Jared Allen launches a Ping-Pong ball from his catapult as he tries to hit a target 30 feet away during Saturday’s first-ever contest sponsored by the Quad-City Engineering and Science Council and held at the Putnam Museum. Team ‘Beatles’ members, from left, Isaac Jankowski, 15, Stephen Peters, 17, and Ian Anglese, 17, and all from Prince of Peace High School in Clinton, Iowa, celebrate a direct hit on the target. (John Schultz/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo
VIDEO: Catapult Contest
The Quad-City Engineering and Science Council conducts the Fling it! Sling …
Watch Video
After the last projectile was fired, the guys who “like to fling stuff” clearly had it over the engineering students.
“We’re really excited about it,” said Isaac Jankowski, 15, a sophomore at Prince of Peace High School in Clinton, Iowa, as his team, the Beatles, picked through a table of prizes.
“Now we get to go to an egg launching contest in Ames,” said Ian Anglese, 17, a junior.
A catapult designed and operated by the Fab Four teenagers bested three other hurling devices put together by high school and college students for the contest sponsored Saturday by the Quad-City Engineering and Science Council in the lobby of Davenport’s Putnam Museum and IMAX Theater.
“They’ve been having the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit here and he did some designs for catapults so we thought this would be a fun thing for everyone to design one and then fire it,” said Pat Barnes, president of the council.
There were only a few rules covering the designs, the main one being that the entire device had to be able to fit into a 2-foot-by-2-foot box.
“If they got any bigger than that, they would shoot too far and we have constricted space here,” said Craig Gehrels, a council member and one of the contest judges.
All of the entries relied on modified slingshot designs, using rubber tubing, metal springs, bungee cords or, in one case, flexible wooden dowels wired together that snapped back into position after being bent and released.
The object was to launch Ping-Pong balls or whiffle golf balls using only human power and hit a target 30 feet away. Each team was given seven shots and 10 minutes in which to fire them. The average of the most accurate five shots of the seven resulted in the score.
Jared Allen, 28, an engineering student at Scott Community College and leader of the Hey There, ‘Ehs team acknowledged that his wooden dowel launch system was simple, but his marksmanship was good enough to earn his crew second place.
“I went to Hobby Lobby and started picking stuff out and we put it together and then I tested it at work,” Allen said.
Ben Wells, 18, of Davenport West High School, and his team Franzenburg, named for “the teacher who dropped this on us two days before the contest,” said his design was hurried and not well tested.
“If we would have had more time, we could have done more testing,” he said.
The Prince of Peace team came up with a design that was built to achieve distance and then tweaked to achieve accuracy, said Nick Jensen, 16, a sophomore. After his team was announced the winner, his mother was so proud.
Tom Saul can be contacted at (563)383-2453 or tsaul@qctimes.com.
del.icio.us
Digg
NewsVine
Fark
reddit» More Local Stories
Highest Rated Articles from the last 7 Days
- Affs Tank -
- Affs Storage Tank - Commercial, Governmental and Industrial applications. Engineering Expertise & Supplier of Tanks, Control Panels, Pumps, Hardware and more. Nationwide Shipping.
- www.pacificpetro.com
- 2008 Diet Of The Year:
- Finally, A Diet That Really Works! Seen On CNN, NBC, CBS & Fox News.
- www.Wu-YiSource.com
- Cheap Airfare
- Compare multiple travel sites. Discount web fares made easy.
- www.LowFares.com
- Ads by Yahoo!
