Recently in Design Category

The writers of the automotive blog Car Spy Guide like to scope out the latest in car design and innovation. As they put it on their blog's about section, the writers are "snooping for the latest automotive news that the car companies don't want you to see." But apparently they're also looking elsewhere, because they recently discovered Missouri S&T's EcoCAR Team and have featured our team on their site.

S&T is one of 17 universities in the U.S. and Canada participating in the EcoCAR Challenge, a competition that requires student teams to re-engineer a GM vehicl to minimize energy consumption, emissions and greenhouse gases while maintaining utility, safety, and performance.

The car spies laud our team for "its commitment to hydrogen energy. Being the only school to use hydrogen as its source of energy shows Missouri S&T's commitment to the future of transportation without relying on gasoline."

You'll be hearing more about this team in the near future. And we promise, it won't be cloak-and-dagger stuff.

You can also check the team's blog for updates, as well as S&T's news site.

Watch as members of the S&T robotics competition team test out their new motor controls from Elmo Motion Control.

This summer, while political candidates (and Paris Hilton) have been arguing about ways to address the nation’s dependence on oil, some ambitious college students from around the world – including one student from Missouri S&T – have been actively working on projects designed to solve problems in developing countries. Michelle Marincel has been helping to design an ergonomic thresher that would reduce the amount of labor required by African women who harvest grains.

Normally we don't like to divert readers' attention from this blog. But the North American Solar Challenge -- a 2,400-mile odyssey from Plano, Texas, to Calgary -- is about to begin, and we want you to follow along and cheer on this dedicated group of Missouri S&T students.

Missouri S&T's entry, Solar Miner VI, qualified for the third position. That means the team will leave Plano at 9:02 a.m. Sunday, July 13, behind the universities of Michigan and Minnesota. All three schools have won the challenge before -- S&T's last trip to the winner's circle being 2003.

You can follow the action on two different blogs: Experience This! (the student design center blog, where Bob Phelan will post updates and photos) and the Solar Miner VI blog, where two communications staffers -- Visions blogger Lance Feyh and video guy Tom Shipley -- will post the latest words and moving pictures from the road. You can also chart the team's progress throughout the race at Solar42.mst.edu.

Using Google mapping tools and their exceptional modeling skills, seven Missouri S&T students put the campus on the map -- on Google Maps, specifically. And in the process, their creation was one of nine winners in Google's 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition.

As our official news release explains:

Each team used Google SketchUp modeling software to create models of campus buildings, then referenced them in Google Earth – a utility that uses satellite imagery and allows web users to “fly” in to anywhere on the planet. The teams then uploaded their creations to the Google 3D Warehouse. The winners were selected by a panel of industry experts.

For their efforts, they each will receive some pretty cool swag: an Apple iPod Touch, a Nintendo Wii Console, and a Google T-shirt and hat.

The judges praised each winning team for the way they "captured the right level of detail to efficiently reflect the character and complexity of the campuses they represented," "used good judgment about what to detail so that interesting aspects of the buildings were captured," and for their "overall consistency to all the models on each campus." The judges also noted: "The photo-texturing was exceptional – people, cars and vegetation were removed so that the building textures were plainly visible."

Great work, team! You really know how to put Missouri S&T on the map.

This just in from our sister blog, Experience This!

A victory in the autocross race and solid performances in the endurance competition helped propel Missouri S&T's Formula SAE Team to its third top-10 finish in five years in the annual Formula SAE international competition, held May 15-17 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich.

Congratulations to the Formula SAE Team for another fine finish. Visit the Experience This! student design blog for more news about the Formula SAE event and Missouri S&T's performance.

At Mindy's instigation, S&T videographer extraordinaire Tom Shipley created a 29-second video of Missouri S&T's bullet bike and entered it into KansasCity.com's 29-second Film Festival. (The festival is in honor of today, Leap Day, Feb. 29.) Have a look and if you like what you see, feel free to leave your five-star rating (and comments) on the site. You can always comment here, too, of course.

And if you've got five minutes to spare, check out the longer version of Tom's bullet bike video, filmed on location in the Nevada desert.

(Cross-posted at Experience This!)

There is an interesting drama unfolding over at Experience This! The world famous UMR/Missouri S&T solar car has been on a long, strange trip (in the back of a truck, mostly) through the south this week. The next stop is Graceland.

Halloween is over, and it's time to chuck those pumpkins...and UMR students were literally chucking pumpkins (albeit small ones) last night out at the UMR soccer field. Using various contraptions that ranged from catapults to mechanized boots, the students tried to launch the pumpkins into several circles painted on the grass. Teams with the most accuracy and power competed for the first annual UMR pumpkin chucking championship. (If anyone knows who the winners were, leave us their names in the comments.) The students who participated are all enrolled in Engineering 111, an experiential design class.

We would be remiss if we didn't mention that this whole pumpkin chucking thing reminds us of the time Chris on Northern Exposure got the idea (from a Monty Python movie) to build a huge catapult in order to fling a cow. (He ended up flinging a piano.)