The LI4E Makerspace Project team wrapped up their Red Bull Creation entry last night, at 9pm EST, and joined in the celebration of a remarkable 72 hours of creative engineering with 11 other teams from around the country! Like Junkyard Wars on steroids, the Red Bull Creation challenged 12 finalist teams, from California to Florida (us!) , to create a game that met four specifications:
1) It had be a physical game as opposed to a computer game,
2) There had be a clear winner,
3) It had to be safe, and
4) It had to be no larger than 8′ X 7.5′ X 7.5′, and weigh no more than 2000 lbs.
LI4E Makerspace created the Spin Master. Played on a circular platform, 7 feet in diameter with A 5′ round table mounted in the center and three chairs secured around it, the whole thing goes merrily around at about 8 RPM. Players seated at the rotating table shoot marbles, trying to score them in their opponents goals across from them. There are two target holes , 1 point and 10 points, at the opposite side of the table from each rider.
Players shoot marbles one at a time toward their goals across the table. The rotation of the table and platform makes the balls appear to curve from the player’s perspective. Balls not going into the target goals will fall into a ‘gutter’ and are out of play. At the end of the game, the player with the highest score wins.
The team ran out of time before they could add the electronic scoring feature and a center target that would make the platform reverse direction when hit by a marble, feature that may still be added just for fun! The team’s Spin Master is a thing of beauty though, expertly built from scratch by team members hailing for Learning is for Everyone’s FIRST Tech Challenge Team Duct Tape, a friend from FTC Team B.A.D. in Longwood, who came out to spend three sleepless days with the team, and LIFE’s remarkable friend, mentor for our engineering programs and mechanical engineer without peer, Paul Markun, of Tampa Technik. And we’re proud that we met all four goals of the challenge in the required time period.
The Red Bull Creation challenge gave us a great opportunity to showcase the empowering fun of creativity, and the educational value of indulging unfettered curiosity! Just from the act of creating the Spin Master, the entire team ended up exploring principles of physics, mechanics, electronics, woodworking, CAD, and more.
On Wednesday, July 25, public voting opens to select the “People’s Choice” Red Bull Creation winner, and we hope you’ll cast your vote for the LI4E Makerspace team, the Little Red Bull Creation Team that not only could, but did, in the fullest spirit of the Red Bull Creation contest, and in the purest Maker spirit – creating for the joy of it!
Visit http://creation.redbullusa.com/ July 25th to see how to cast your vote! Thank you!
