National Engineers Week gets rolling at UC Irvine

UC IRVINE — Timothy George had a challenge Tuesday morning: how to make a vehicle travel a long distance downhill with the passenger staying put. He settled on a method both brutal and effective.

George, a civil engineering major, impaled his passenger on one of the spokes and sent the contraption on its way. The passenger in question was a Gummi Bear, and the makeshift vehicle consisted of five Ritz crackers with a toothpick running through them. When George’s car finally stopped rolling — beating its nearest competitor by more than 10 feet — he lifted it up in triumph.

“He’s not very happy, but he’s a winner,” he said, pointing to the Gummi Bear with a skewer through it.

George was among a handful of students who entered the Delicious Dash competition, the first event of UC Irvine’s 34th annual National Engineers Week. For his victory, the transfer student won $25 — which he said would probably go toward dinner.

Every year, UCI’s Engineering Student Council puts on a series of events inviting students to strut their mechanical savvy. The Delicious Dash, in which participants crafted cars out of crackers, candy and peanut butter, kicked off the festivities this year. Later on the schedule were paper airplane and catapulting contests, an egg drop and a competition to build elaborate machines in the style of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

“The main goal of this competition is to see how innovative the students will be,” said Danny Eusebio, a member of Fusion, the student engineering club that sponsored the Delicious Dash.

Shortly after 11 a.m., three members of Fusion set out piles of food by the McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium and invited students to try their hand at vehicle design. Each participant got two graham crackers, six Ritz crackers, six marshmallows, six toothpicks, a Gummi Bear — and two shared jars of peanut butter to make everything stick together.

Most of the entrants created cars the standard way, with two axels and the Gummi Bear stuck to a makeshift driver seat. Only George’s creation rolled more than a few inches off the wooden ramp, which the organizers propped against a bench. That was in part because he did away with typical car design altogether; his vehicle consisted of a single thick wheel.

“The key to winning, especially in small projects like this, is K.I.S.S. — keep it simple, stupid,” George said. “People try to get over-creative, and then bad things happen.”