National Engineering Month is in full swing and the Waterloo Engineering Society is about half-way through its NEM campaign. In this time we’ve hosted two events, the NEM Rube Goldberg Machine building and CANstruction. Still to come, we have the K’Nex Bridge Building at THE MUSEUM and the Charity Bus Push.
The NEM Rube Goldberg event resulted in the Engineering Society’s successful construction of a creative Rube Goldberg Machine. Over three afternoons in March, Will Klanac lead a small team of students to plan and build the machine. The machine incorporated several fun elements, including a car racetrack, several domino trains and golf ball tracks. The Rube Goldberg machine was then filmed as it connected to several other Rube Goldberg machines, built by other engineering schools in Ontario, via the use of cell phones. The final NEM Rube Goldberg video will be available in late March, where you can see the CN Tower be lit up purple.
The CANstruction event occurred Friday, March 14 where several volunteers, lead by Janna Henzl and Julie Zhang, built a life size Olaf, the snowman from Frozen, out of over 1000 cans of Tuna. The build took approximately five hours at Conestoga mall in Waterloo, where other teams were also building amazing structures out of cans. All of the cans used during the CANstruction event were donated to the Waterloo Region Food Bank.
One of final two events that will round out National Engineering Month is the K’Nex Bridge Building Competition. K’nex bridge building will take place March 21st and 22nd at THE MUSEUM in Kitchener. During this event, elementary school children will be challenged to build the strongest bridge they can build out of K’Nex pieces. Engineering Society members will be at the event to assist the organizers in making the event a success.
Lastly, the Charity Bus Push will take place on Sunday, March 22nd. During this event, University of Waterloo Engineering students will pull a bus over 6.5km from Waterloo campus all the way to Charles St. Terminal in Kitchener. All pushers will collect monetary pledges which will be donated to oneROOF, a charity organization in Kitchener that helps homeless and at-risk youth in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. So far, class visits to first-year classes to help promote and inform them of the event have been successful. If you are interested in helping pull the bus, please pick up a pledge form from the Orifice and meet up on Sunday, March 22nd at 10:30 am in the CPH Foyer.
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