ABINGTON, Pa. — First-year Penn State Abington engineering majors tested boats they built recently for a required cornerstone design course using cardboard, thin plastic sheeting and duct tape to transport one adult across a local pool.
The brainchild of David Brown, a licensed professional engineer and lecturer in the program, the Cardboard Regatta featured teams of students who collaborated to design a boat that would keep one of their teammates dry while paddling a lap at the Willow Grove YMCA.
“The goals of the project were for students to learn about the engineering process and rapid prototyping. They had to design and build three progressively larger boats, find out what worked and what didn’t, and then improve it. It’s the basis of the engineering process. They learned about teamwork, scheduling, documentation, experimentation and data collection,” Brown said.
During the five-week process, the teams tested the first iteration of their boats, which carried two pounds of weight, in the duck pond on Abington’s campus. They then modified their designs and scaled them up to carry 20 pounds before taking two weeks for the full-size build that they tested at the pool.