During my freshman year of college, I was working toward a mechanical engineering major and was taking an engineering fundamentals course. One of the big projects in the class was a tug-of-war challenge, where groups would build cars to compete against one another in a tournament. The requirements were that everyone could only use two mouse traps and/or two rubber bands as the power source for their car. The cars would be hooked to opposite ends of a fishing line that was run over the top of a table with a flag in the middle. The cars would be let go at the same time and the car that pulled the flag to its side would be declared the winner.
My group’s design started out like most others did - something that was strong enough to be yanked around and that moved under the power of the rubber bands. But then we began diving deeper into our strategy for winning the competition. Did we want to build a bigger, heavier car that would build momentum and overpower a smaller one? Did we want a smaller car with greater acceleration to take up more of the slack in the line before the other car could? We decided to take the approach of taking up as much slack in the line as possible as soon as the car was released, then simply holding our ground as best we could. It was then that I took a closer look at the rules and realized that the line could be attached to any part of the car, and all that mattered was that the flag was on our side at the end. The idea for the design that would give our car its iconic shape was born. Using the mousetraps that we had originally discarded, we built an arm to which we would attach the line. We also added a set of “ratcheting” teeth that would dig into the carpet if the car was pulled backward.
The final result was a car that won the tournament by using the mousetrap-powered arm to take up a significant portion of the slack in the line, before leaping forward and digging in. I was proud of my creativity and ability to think outside the box with this project, and the alligator aesthetics were a bonus.
