Vancouver Island University’s engineering transfer program students have finished off their learning year with creations that would do honour to Rube Goldberg.
In the Nanaimo campus’ upper cafeteria, the students spent their last day of class Friday, April 11, demonstrating how they put their heads and their projects together to create interconnected rolling ball structures.
Nine four-student teams worked together to build their individual devices that are essentially convoluted ways to transport steel ball bearings along tracks by raising them with a lift system and, once at the top, letting gravity do the rest, with some mechanisms and electronics installed to control the speed and spacing of the balls along their journeys.
Getting the mechanics, electronic sensors and programming the control systems assembled and functioning for each project presented a range of difficulties for the teams to work on their separate projects and figure out how to connect their creations together to smoothly pass the balls along from project to project and keep them moving in a continuous loop.
"They were asked to design rolling ball structures to demonstrate physics and engineering principles to the K-12 system, so each team worked on its own to develop a project that would take balls from a neighbouring team, do various activities to it … and pass it on to the next team to continue along," said Brian Dick,
VIU engineering transfer program chairperson. "The projects can work independently or they can work as a collective. If they all work together, they should send a ball around an entire ring to return to the first one again."
The first- and second-year students also learned to demonstrate a major project they'd been working on for the entire term, which included concept development and writing and presenting project proposals for approval.
The only requirements for the construction materials used in the projects, Dick said, was the load bearing elements of each structure had to be wood and the rails or tracks the balls rolled on had to be made from metal. At least one structure was created from popsicle sticks, while another team pressed pop cans into service for the ball track.
First-year engineering student Claire Jané, who said she started writing computer coding as a child when her parents bought her a children's Scratch coding kit, wrote the programming and did much of the decorative work for her team's project titled NRG Machine.
"This is the most fun I've ever had on a project because doing little Scratch programming things is one thing, doing coding projects and computer science is another thing, but having all these cool … ideas and then to see them all brought to life, it's just a different feeling and makes me feel like I know what I'm doing is what I'm meant to be doing," Jané said.
