Published on May 3rd, 2024
Last modified May 3rd, 2024 01:24 pm
Students from Southwest Virginia Community College hosted an engineering competition on Friday, May 3, 2024, welcoming peers from Mountain Empire Community College and Virginia Highlands Community College. The event, part of the Engineering Consortium, challenged teams to build machines capable of launching golf balls at targets and buckets, with scoring based on accuracy.
Brian Hale, head of the Engineering Program at Southwest, highlighted the competition’s educational value. “The most important thing that students are learning is to relate what we do in the class to the real world,” Hale said. “Do the calculations work? What kinds of assumptions did we make in the classroom that weren’t right, and what sort of allowances do we need to make in the real world?”
The competition served as a practical application of classroom theories was was an opportunity for students from the three schools to meet and collaborate.