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Baseball Boyz

How did three Mechanical Engineering students, all of whom describe themselves as "lousy" baseball players,

ASME Prize winners

A hands-on engineering education takes on a whole new spin for (from left) Darren Johnson of LaPine, Brian Gin of Beaverton, and
Kalan Guiley of Corvallis.
manage to design a baseball-throwing machine that is so accurate it won first place at an international design contest in New Orleans, landed the students on the front pages of several leading newspapers, and made them $3,000 richer?

Basic, well-executed engineering and tight teamwork, the students claim. Although they admit that long hours spent playing with LEGOs when they were kids might have helped, too. And they are quick to credit their mechanical engineering professors who developed a class around an annual design competition sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which creates a different design challenge for student teams every year.

Associate professor Bob Paasch, who co-teaches the course with assistant professor Ping (Christine) Ge, says the OSU College of Engineering is the only engineering school in the nation he knows of that builds an entire course around the ASME design challenge.


This year's challenge was based on a hypothetical sporting goods manufacturer's request for a device that could determine defective baseballs by analyzing their flight paths, with good balls landing within a specified target area. That challenge translated into a lot of engineering challenges--and learning--for the student team.

The rules of the competition were strict, requiring participants to conceptualize, design, and build a machine that could throw up to 30 baseballs through three different 8- inch target holes in less than two minutes. The complete device, excluding the 30 baseballs, had to fit within a rigid 30x50x30-centimeter storage box before assembly. And when removed from the box and fully assembled (in no more than 30 minutes), the device could not exceed one cubic meter in size. Finally, it had to be started with a single switch and could not be touched thereafter.

In the end, the OSU team's machine successfully tossed 23 of 30 balls through the target holes to win the competition that drew teams from as far away as Mexico and India. Not bad for three guys who claim they were all thumbs when it came to playing baseball as kids.

"In Little League, I had to stop pitching because I was beaning too many batters," said team member Darren Johnson, a senior from LaPine. "And I only made it to T-ball," added Kalan Guiley, a senior from Corvallis. "I had a nasty tendency to always hit the plastic T instead of the ball." Brian Gin, a senior from Beaverton, said he only played first base, "because on first, I didn't have to move around very much."

"I think we'll definitely leave it up to a machine instead of our athletic ability when it comes to throwing baseballs," Johnson said.

But all three agree that they learned an "incredible amount" from the yearlong experience.

"The fact that Brian, Darren, and I had the chance to build a device from the ground up, designing many of the components ourselves, and that it functioned as successfully as it did is a testament to not only the opportunities at OSU, but also the skills with which the College equips students so that they may be successful in the pursuit of those opportunities," Guiley said.

The hands-on nature of the class, Paasch said, gives students a good taste for the multiple challenges they'll face as engineers when they enter the job market. "In this class, students not only have to design something on paper, they have to build it," he said. "They get more and better feedback from this project than we professors could ever give them, because they have to figure out how it's all going to come together."

And that process, although frustrating at times, makes for a good learning experience. "Sometimes frustration can be a very good teacher," said Johnson, grinning.

But what about those seven balls that missed the targets? The OSU team says there is a simple explanation: those balls were defective, of course.

 

Note: This story appears in the college's 2003 Spring newsletter, "Engineer". Would you like to hear more? Then download the PDF and read the whole thing!

Kalan Guiley
Kalan GuileyA senior in the OSU Honors College, Kalan Guiley is double-majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Philosophy with a pre-med option and plans to attend medical school to become a pediatric oncologist. He has served as chair of the OSU ASME Section, is vice president of the mechanical engineering honor society Pi Tau Sigma, volunteers as a mentor for a high school robotics team, is active in the OSU Aerial Robotics Team, the Speech and Debate Team, and the philosophy and pre-med clubs on campus. “OSU Engineering has prepared me to be successful in life in ways I never thought possible,” Guiley says. “OSU Engineering teaches you an approach to the world, a way to simultaneously address problems within the individual components of a system, and the system as a whole.”

Darren Johnson
Darren JohnsonDarren Johnson was pre-selected for the Multiple Engineering Co-Op Program (MECOP) at OSU while still in high school. He says his parents limited his TV watching and never bought video games for him. “Instead, they encouraged me to play with LEGOs and other toys that stimulate creativity,” he says. “My father is very mechanically inclined and it must have worn off on me because I’ve always been fascinated with machines.” But he admits his parents were not always “keen” on the inventions he dreamed up, like the time he attempted to attach a chainsaw engine to the back of his bicycle. At OSU Engineering he’s been able “to balance academic knowledge with practical experience,” he says.

Brian Gin
Brian GinGrowing up in Beaverton, Oregon, Brian Gin’s primary pastimes were playing with LEGOs, building forts out of scrap lumber (or snow when the Oregon winters cooperated) and “occasionally” picking on his sister. “My grandfather was an electrical engineer and my father is an accountant,” Gin says. “So math and science ran in the family.” A musician, Gin has played in bands from grade school through college, and while at OSU has been selected for two six-month MECOP internships. “MECOP is one of my top reasons why I chose OSU,” he says. “The job experience you gain through the MECOP program is a great advantage for a young engineer.”