Winona State University hosted young future engineers from local schools to show off their skills and creativity with their Rube Goldberg machines.

On Friday, March 17, Winona State hosted the Engineering Machine Design Contest in the Baldwin Lounge of Kryzsko Commons. This year’s theme for the contest was “Into Orbit” and ten teams from schools in the area competed against each other to determine who would move on to finals. The event was fully funded by local businesses in the engineering industry such as Siemens, 3M, ECI, Solvay, ATP, Core and Benchmark.

The format of how teams would be judged was simple. First, the team would give a short presentation on how they made their machine and what it was supposed to do. Then, they would do a test run of the machine, reset and fix anything that went wrong, do a second run and finally receive comments from the judges.

The teams got creative with the designs for their machines to fit the “Into Orbit” theme. Team 1, nicknamed the “Octo-cats,” built their machine around a replica of the Mars rover. Another team had a Star Wars themed machine, the end result of which would turn on the lightsaber of a large Darth Vader figurine.

At the event was Dr. Eric Kerr-Anderson, who is in his fourth year of teaching in Winona State’s Composite Materials Engineering program.

According to Kerr-Anderson, one of the main reasons for this contest was that “there just aren’t that many opportunities for our students to have iterative improvement projects like they used to.”

At its core, the Engineering Machine Design Contest’s goal is to help kids, who plan to major in engineering when they go to college, develop the hands on skills they will need for such a career.

Kerr-Anderson said he saw the event as a “celebration of people trying.”

Trial and error are a natural part of engineering. This is why the judges allowed teams to have a test run to see what needed last-minute tweaking before their second run.

This also brings up the problem-solving aspect of majoring in engineering.

“If you want to be a technical problem solver it’s a good place to look,” Kerr-Anderson said.

When talking about outcomes for the event, Kerr-Anderson also said that “I’d love to see some of these students down the road, come here and possibly look at engineering.”

Another hope Kerr-Anderson had was for “more community involvement and more interaction with more of the schools nearby Winona.”

Dr. Beckry Abdel-Magid, Winona State professor and department chair for the Composite Materials Engineering program, also expressed his views on the contest.

Abdel-Magid also emphasized the hands-on nature of the event for the students involved, saying it would help them “connect their brain with their hands and make their ideas become a reality.”

Through this, students can learn how to channel their creativity into engineering to create solutions for different kinds of problems.

Abdel-Magid believed that this event could show these students the opportunities that Winona State could offer them when they decide to go to college.

“We have a great college of science and engineering; we have two programs in engineering…we want to show our interest in them,” Abdel-Magid said.

By hosting the contest at the university, it gives Winona States College of Science and Engineering the chance to scout out some potential future students.

Abdel-Magid wanted to stress the importance of Winona State’s “two unique engineering programs,” being the composite materials engineering program and general engineering program.

The composite materials engineering program is especially important since this area of Minnesota is well-known for that industry.

According to Abdel-Magid, “the city of Winona has been a pioneer in the industry of composite materials.”

With the prevalence of composite material engineering in Southeast Minnesota, Abdel-Magid stated “we want to show the world that we are here, and we are doing a good thing for the industry.”

Thanks goes out to Dean Charla Miertschin of the College of Science and Engineering as well as the community judges who volunteered their time for the event.