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Mission Impossible or Possible Mission? By Hemanth Meka Campus Life Staff ATLANTA November 13, 1998
 The lights were on all night in the MRDC building. Students were spread out in hallways, labs, and classrooms. Weird contraptions were running down ramps, snapping mousetraps, and sending golf balls in every direction possible.
No, Georgia Tech was not making a documentary about the effects of caffeine on undergraduate students, but the Mechanical Engineering 3110 class was hard at work on their quarterly design project.
ME 3110, also known as Creative Decisions and Design, has long been one of the most feared classes among mechanical and nuclear engineering majors.
Alumni talk of the thirty page lab reports and the endless sleepless nights spent on this project, and students fear the deadlines and competitions associated with the project. However, the class has been restructured in recent times shifting the focus more towards the Creative decisions and design part of the course, rather than the 'report' aspect of the course.
This quarter, ME 3110 students were assigned the task of building a machine capable of retrieving five golf balls ten feet from the starting point. The device, required to fit in a 1 foot cube, could only use energy that can derived from gravity and/or 5 mousetraps.
The competition was set for November 6th, 1998. The judges, faculty and staff involved with the ME Department, awarded points for the Aesthetics and Performance of each device.
To gain points for aesthetics, teams did a variety of things. One team came to the competition dressed in Home Depot t-shirts, calling their device 'The Ramblin' Rodent'. Another team used toy tires, showing the judges their use of 'Goodyear' tires.
The devices were all unique in their own way, either through design or aesthetics. Most groups chose to either use a car to hit back the golf balls, although some groups utilized a lasso-like device to bring the balls back to the starting line.
Some students didn't go home the nights before the competition, tinkering away at their devices. The TAs stayed up as well to give students time to get their device
working.
Friday morning saw a flurry of activity, starting at 8 a.m. By 12 p.m.-Competition time, most teams were ready.
The atrium of the MRDC building was packed with the students, judges and many eager students and faculty passing by. When the competition was over, ME 3110 students left the MRDC building relieved, yet exhausted.
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Copyright © 1998 by Gregory S. Scherrer, Editor and by the Student Publications Board
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