Frictional path

"Frictional Path" was a model based game based on flow dynamics, organized at our annual college fest "ZARF 2011". In this event students were allowed to form a group of four and together come up with a unique design to achieve a goal. Each group was given a card board, few A4 papers, 3-4 plastic cups, little sand, a piece of jute cloth and a marble ball. The goal was to build a restricting path for the ball so that the ball takes longest time to travel the path before coming to stop. For the case when ball stops in between the path the time the time it took from the beginning till the point it stopped was noted and minimum three trials were allowed. There were many interesting designs from different groups, some built zigzag paths, others designed multi story slope. Some used all the resources including sand and jute cloth. It was interesting to see.

But the winning design was a very simple path with cardboard, paper and cups, without using sands or jute cloth. And amazingly, this simple looking design was way too ahead of others in terms of achieving its goal. Though I could not recall the actual time in seconds but the runner up team was no where near the winning team. And this wining team was my team. It was more important for as the idea for this design first came into my head and even I was unable to predict that it would be so successful. It was just spontaneous. The event gave me one great lesson, that it is not the always the most complicated designs that are the best but the most simple ones, and they should be tried first, as we may never know the magnitude of success, and this is really what engineering is. In our case we used the least minimum resources and still were way ahead of others.

Certificate frictional path.jpg

A .gif picture of the outlines of our design model is below and I have tried my best to replicate it with the actual model. Since the design was easy it was not so difficult to replicate.

By click on the picture below a simulation of the model can be visualized.