McCormick juniors Lyndon Sapozhnik and Michael Chen’s googly-eyed robot won Saturday’s twenty-first annual McCormick Design Competition, earning a $1000 grand prize. The team also received the annual Myke Minbiole Elegant Engineering Award. McCormick seniors Sam Schwartz and Jake Vander Ploeg, team “Brobotics,” took second place.
In this year’s competition, 11 teams designed and built autonomous robots to compete in the arena, about eight by 12 feet, to collect strategically placed foam cubes and place them in a designated scoring zone. Extra points were awarded for any cube that was put into a “bonus-scoring zone,” a basket behind the arena’s 12-inch wall.The Design Competition was the culmination of Engineering Week. Hosted by the McCormick Student Advisory Board, “E Week” included free bagels at Tech, a Paper Airplane Competition, rocket launches and a root beer keg.