In the months of March and April there becomes a strong sense of competition in the halls of the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science as students enrolled in EGN 1007 – Engineering Concepts and Methods (Intro to Engineering) build boats to compete in the Great Navel Orange Race. GNOR as we shall call it, is a design competition in which teams of 3-5 must build a boat which can hold an orange and shuttle it around the UCF Reflection Pond. The fastest teams get to compete in a finals round which has a prize for 3 years of textbooks paid for. The competition was on Friday.
I spent the better part of thursday and all of that night working on stuff relating to GNOR. First of all, we had to have an AutoCAD drawings of our project, which is one piece of software I just dont really gel with. So after downloading the 2008 trial, I found myself spending 5 or so hours in AutoCAD painfully recreating my teams watercraft to the best of my abilities. I was also the editor of the tech report, and that was a nightmare. One group member wrote his entries so poorly it made my roomate and I bust into laughter while still wondering how this person got into college.
I knew it would be an all-nighter in order to get things done. Around midnight me and my roomate frantically tried to connect to the Engineering remote system so we could write programs in MATLAB as required for the tech report. After 45 minutes of failing to find some way I got the bright idea to use the MATLAB online trial, which nearly took both of ours 2 hour allotted trial time to write the m-file and run it. At 3:00 AM the delivery guy from Silver Mine Subs brought us our late night dinner. After more editing, my groups tech report was done and my roomate sent his part off to his group. Feeling accomplished we went to go see if they were setting up yet at 5 AM, but they wernt and instead we wondered around campus trying to get into Engineering III, discovered a 24 hour computer lab, and also found many caches of easter eggs in the grass everywhere.
At 7:35 my roomate and his group checked in and I was suppossed to as well, but talked to my TA and told her we would be back at 12:30. I watched the first boats go and some were quite interesting, including the one made from K’nex. My speech class was semi-cancelled, so I was there for only 15 minutes and no EGN Lecture. Came back at 12:30, but was told that we had to come back at 2:20 instead. Me and my one friend could make it but would be close with us both having physics classes that get out at 2:20. I skipped out of class a few minutes early and ran to the pond (luckily Math and Physics is right next door), to make the cutoff. My friend joined up with me shortly and we made our way to the starting lanes.
As soon as pre-race prep was complete, the horn was blown. I put our boat in the water, but it made a very sharp U-turn, so I went reclaimed it and set it back the right way. It still turned, but this time into the outer wall. I was thinking “What is happening…Our test run an hour ago, it went perfectly straight!” I made another reset and this time it hit a ballon obsticle which was good. For some reason the ballow gave it the ability to navigate a bit better until a water jet from the fountain caused it to turn back towards a wall. Soon enough the 5 minute horn was called. We didnt win, but it doesnt really matter. It was fun, and only like 6 boats finished. The hard part was getting through my 3 hour physics lab afterwards….
Enough with reading, here are some pictures of my group’s boat:
