Asa Fix
News Reporter

On Feb. 13, the second annual Trebuchet Challenge was held by Mesa State’s freshmen engineering project class. The competition took place on the intramural field in front of Grand Mesa Residence Hall.
Gigi Richards, faculty coordinator for MSC/CU-Boulder Mechanical Engineering partnership, said all freshmen and sophomore engineering students are required to take the course.
“It’s a design class, so they’re learning engineering design principles and learning how to work in a team. The Trebuchet Challenge is the introductory project to the class.” Richards said.
A trebuchet is an ancient war machine that was used to hurl large objects in war, much like a catapult. The goal was to construct a trebuchet that would launch a hacky sack at a three foot tall castle, 50 feet away. There were 12 teams of five students. In order to score points, the teams needed to hit the castle for 10 points. For every foot off the target, a point was subtracted. There was an additional bonus round where teams could receive a total of 11 points if the hacky sack landed in a hole on the castle. Each team had five attempts.
In the end there was a three-way tie between team Mizfits, team Won, and team Leftovers. The tiebreaker went to team Mizfits because they hit the castle twice, which was more than the competition.
“All of the trebuchets were different in one way or another. Some were made out of wood, some out of PVC pipe, and some had metal components,” said Mana Shigematsu, sophomore engineering major. “It was a pretty good experience. There was a lot of trial-and-error involved, along with problem solving, and team work.”
The other two instructors who had students participating in the competition were Max McFarland and Peter Rekemeyer. They both said the competition was the climax of the engineering students’ first project.
Each team received $25 to buy materials to build the trebuchet. The winner was awarded a $25 gift card to Lowes.
Alex Davis, a sophomore engineering major, who was on the winning team, Mizfits, thought it was a really good and fun experience, from building the prototype to firing the model. He believes they won because they had the right approach to the project.
“It definitely helped build teamwork skills. Surprisingly we didn’t need very much time outside of class for building it, we met up once for about an hour outside of class and that was it,” Davis said. “The key was to have great plans so we wouldn’t have to reconstruct after we built it to scale. We noticed all the other teamProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

in our class were building their trebuchets while all we were doing were sketches and calculations but once we began to build it we didn’t need to redesign like all the other teams.”