This year's competition had lessons for both the students and the organizers. Two years ago, in an attempt to push students to more creative designs, we put in place a bonus system for vehicles that where lighter or used less non paper weight. While this seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out to be a two edged sword. While it did push students to be more creative it also resulted in far fewer vehicles being able to complete the race course. Discussions with students and staff revealed that students where focussing so heavily on the bonuses that they were sacrificing the structural integrity of the vehicle. While this was not their intention, they where basically leaving little or no margin for error.

One of the things that most engineering students will learn at some point in their course work is that all engineering design work is done with some safety factor. Common engineering materials have standard values that can be used based on the type of stress that the material will be subjected to. If a designer uses too large a safety factor then their design is too bulky and over built, too small a safety factor and the design may be prone to failure.

One of my favorite sayings is “In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice they are not.” That proved to be the case with our bonus point system. Oh well, easy come easy go. Next year we will modify the rules to elliminate the bonus sytem and see what happens.

Team “Rollin Recyclables”

Team “Rollin Recyclables” from Spokane Community College did put in a very respectable time of 2:19. Their sturdy tricycle design kept up a good pace and they had no mechanical problems or penalties.

I would like to thank all the students and faculty who made this year's competition such a great one. I also want to mention all the schools that sent teams:
Eastern Washington University, Everett Comminity College, Green River Community College, Spokane Community College and Spokane Falls Community College.

If you are a student or faculty member and are looking into this competition for the first time, I hope you will consider joining us in the year 2000. For those of you who participated in our competition, I look forward to seeing you and your new designs.

Once again, thanks to all.
Sincerely
Keith Turpin