03 August 2012

The Amazing Spaghetti Machine

Apologies for misleading title as this blog post is not about the Italian dish but instead, its about a high school competition =)


For the past few months I was given opportunities to cover events under Melbourne University Photographic Club, Fotoholics. One of the recent events I covered that took my attention was The Amazing Spaghetti Machine Contest 2012, organised by the Melbourne School of Engineering. Its a competition where a group of year 10 students work together to build an overly complex machine or device that is used to perform a relatively simple task. Here's one of the team's machine. The task is to take a picture with the laptop. If you look carefully, you can see me in the photo in the laptop, top right frame.


I was told by one of the teachers that the students started planning and building the machine since the beginning  of the year. The machine required do at least 10 different actions in the competition and each actions must not be repetitive of the same type of energy. Now I was never a science or engineering person to begin with so most of the time, I don't really understand what is going but it was fun to watch.

I wasn't the only one having fun watching. 

A father and daughter anticipate the next action.

A spectator observed carefully on one of the contestant's machine. 

Due to the complexity of the machines, a high level of attention to details is highly required for these scholars. They checked their machines many times, making sure nothing will screw up when the judges are looking.




As you would expect, some of the popular things they used are like dominos and marbles.



One of the contestant had a shoe in their machine for some "kicking" force. 

Taking a break. 

In the end, I'm sure it was quite an experience for the students do such projects. Can't help to feel envious that I didn't had any similar experience in my high school days =)

Thanks for reading.

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