Future Contests
Ok, this is the most important place on this website. We need your ideas for great contests.
The hardest thing about putting this contest on each year is coming up with a challenging contest.
The contest has to meet several strenuous criteria:
- It has to be fun to build, and entertaining to watch
- The challenge must be safe enough to not pose an undue risk of life or limb to contestants and spectators
- The challenge must involve an element of “finesse”. That is, brute force alone does not guarantee success.
Throwing a frisbee is a great example, since you can’t succeed by just pushing really hard on the frisbee...
the subtle problems of spin, launch angle, and stability must be addressed.
- The challenge must permit some sort of criterion for judging the winner.
Quantitative measures such as "how far did it go" are preferred but not necessary.
- The challenge must be within the scope of what a team of 8 highly creative people can build out of junk
with one week of design time, 2 days of build time, and a $500 budget.
- The challenge must allow multiple design solutions.
For example, "build a flying machine" is more open than "build an airplane", because it allows the
contestants to decide whether to build a balloon, helicopter, ornithopter, or fixed-wing airplane.
- Ideally, the challenge will not already have been done on the TV show "Junkyard Wars".
This, of course, makes things much more difficult, but so far we have succeeded.
- The contest must be such that it can be held in venues that are easily accessible from Vancouver.
For example "a machine to shake coconuts out of palm trees" would be difficult,
since there aren’t a lot of coconut palms around Vancouver.