Professional engineering fraternity hosts catapult competition
Fall was in the air at Northside Baptist Church’s recreational fields in Lexington this weekend on a chilly, blustery Saturday morning; the leaves were changing, and a youth flag football team cheered gleefully.
By the afternoon, that sentiment became more literal as pumpkins, a staple of the season, hurled through the air to close the first annual Pumpkin Chunkin’ competition hosted by Theta Tau, the professional engineering fraternity, in which nine high school teams and their catapults fought for a grand prize.
Teams were judged on their apparatuses’ accuracy and distance and on the teams’ design and understanding of engineering concepts. The winning team, from Clover High School, received $500 to support its school’s Project Lead the Way program; second- and third-place teams won $350 and $250, respectively.
Project Lead the Way provides an engineering curriculum and the opportunity to earn college course credit for middle and high school students, much like the College Board’s Advance Placement program does for other fields, explained the event’s coordinator Ray Cormany, a third-year chemical engineering student.
Theta Tau, though, wanted to make engineering more tangible and engaging for these students.
“Several brothers and I worked a Project Lead the Way event over spring break last year, and there wasn’t a whole lot of product,” Cormany said. “All they tested were principles. ... There was no final result that they could actually see or physically touch.”
Cormany then remembered building a catapult in his high school physics class and contacted Project Lead the Way this spring about starting a statewide competition.
For high school students on Saturday, the event was an opportunity to apply their educations and think like an engineer.
On its first test fire, a catapult built by Wren High School in Anderson fell backward on its counterweight, snapping the rig’s wooden arm.
Over the “shock and surprise,” said Brandon Tollack, a senior at Wren, the team was forced to scramble for a fix. But thinking in engineering terms “has sort of become second nature for us. We’ve been taking engineering classes throughout our high school years. ... We just tend to think that way.”
After about 20 minutes of arguing over structural integrity and design, the team fired off a water-filled rubber ball aimed at a flag about 30 yards downfield and cheered as it landed just eight feet from their target.
Their next test shot flew straight backward. It was a reminder that for all these teams’ careful planning, the competition was less than an exact science.
Fredrick Hawes, a junior at Clover High School, recalled that his team made changes to their design by a process of trial and error after their first test broke the catapult’s arm.
“We have changed it to the point where it’s not the same machine anymore,” Hawes said.
Added Alexander Harris, a senior and Hawes’ teammate, “it’s been a complete metamorphosis.”
For John Clegg, a second-year biomedical engineering student and member of Theta Tau, seeing students work on their apparatuses made the competition a meaningful endeavor.
“It was great to see these high school students working on their catapults,” Clegg said. “I would hope they’d be able to have fun working on physics and engineering while building a catapult.” If they were able to do so, he added, “that’s the ultimate success of the event.”