It takes a boatload of student ingenuity and lots of oranges to pull off the Great Navel Orange Race at the ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½βs iconic Reflecting Pond.
Created 25 years ago by Professor Manoj Chopra and his colleagues, the Great Navel Orange Race is a rite of passage for first-year engineering students. The all-day event showcases studentsβ handcrafted self-propelled vessels, which are evaluated on how well they can carry a half-pound orange while racing around the Reflecting Pond. Boats must follow a required route, aiming to clock the fastest time in under five minutes. Boats that actually make it to the finish line and win their early race heats get to compete in the final races of the top 16 teams for the winning title.
Participating is a requirement for students in ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½βs Introduction to Engineering course and represents the first hands-on engineering experience for many first-year students.
Students must design and build their boats within strict rules that provide engineering challenges, such as buoyancy, propulsion, material costs and trade-offs between vessel weight and speed. The rules include a variety of prohibited propulsion methods, including some non-traditional methods attempted in the past, such as compressed gas, assistance from animals and Mentos mints.
Materials for the boats must not exceed $80, and students must turn-in their receipts to prove it. Many boats on race day are seen with recycled soda bottles and lower-cost material, such as foam, instead of higher-cost wood.
βCreating a boat that can carry an orange and race around the reflecting pond is much more difficult than it sounds,β says course instructor Jacqueline Sullivan β89 β91MS, a ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½ engineering alumna.
Sullivan has taught the Introduction to Engineering course for six years, and says the goal of the boat race β the lab portion of the course β is to teach students the basic steps of the engineering design process by immersing them into a team-based project.
βEarly in the semester students are placed onto a team,β Sullivan says. βAlong the way they learn critical soft skills and technical skills that will help them become more creative and more confident engineering students.”
The experience reinforces the importance of teamwork, project scheduling, budget planning, technical writing, engineering graphic design skill, and hands-on building skills, such as soldering.
βDuring the pre-race βtest dayβ in the pond, students experience technical difficulties with their boats and work hard to overcome these challenges,β Sullivan says.
Mechanical engineering majors Fiifi Baiden and Francisco Perez Green, and computer engineering major Vinson Guzman, built their boat with recycled drink cans and water bottles to keep costs to a minimum.
βWe drink this stuff every day so we put the containers to use,β Perez Green says.
They tested the boat in Perez Greenβs swimming pool.
βOur boat was going really slow and it started leaking,β he says, adding that the experience helped the teammates understand the collaborative engineering process.
βWe learned about practicality, working as a team, and improvising to accomplish our goal,β Baiden says.
Sullivan credits teaching assistants and graduate teaching assistants who play a key role in supporting more than 1,200 students enrolled in the Introduction to Engineering course.
βMany students who took the class and loved it come back after a year or two as TAs by helping the younger students β they are good mentors to the freshmen,β Sullivan says.
Next yearβs Great Navel Orange Race will provide ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½ engineering alums a chance to reconnect with the competition, according to Sullivan.
βWe plan to involve alumni next year to race and help students with expenses (through sponsorships) because 275 student teams can go through lots of solder, soldering irons, foam, glue sticks and motors.β
This yearβs race was sponsored by the ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½ College of Engineering and Computer Science, and ΒιΆΉΣ³»΄«Γ½βs student chapters of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
