Posts Tagged SDSMT
Awesome demonstration of design of experiments
Posted by mark in design of experiments on April 27, 2009
Team Awesome
The engineering students at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology really do rock. Where else could one present a class on statistics until 8:30 pm on a Friday night and continue it less than 12 hours later – early on a Saturday morning?
Our workshop on design of experiments (DOE) finished with a spirited competition of paper helicopters.* The winner was Team Awesome: Kayla Rithmiller, MacKenzie Trask and Samantha Johnson (pictured from left to right). They scored highest on the basis of flight time and accuracy. You can see their ‘copter spinning to another precise landing in their confirmation run.
Congratulations to Team Awesome and all the SDSM&T students who devoted their free time to learning DOE and demonstrating this newly-gained knowledge via well-planned experiments on the helicopter exercise. I predict that they all will go far!
*See details on this DOE exercise in the September 2004 Stat-Teaser article on Playing with Paper Helicopters.
Holiday fun — tossing leftover fruit cakes with trebuchet
Hank loads a missile
Not sure what to do with that rock-hard holiday cake riddled with fluorescent fruit? Fling it! But don’t just hand toss that fruit cake, use medieval missile-hurling machinery called a trebuchet. Unlike a catapult that operates on tension or torsion (a heavy rubber-band is used for scale models), a trebuchet uses a counterweight as its energy source. I got the one pictured from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T) in Rapid City for purposes of experimental design. However, I never considered using it to launch fruit cakes like they do at city celebrations in Pepin, Wisconsin. The record for flinging these unappreciated holiday confections is claimed by Manitou, Colorado at their Great Fruitcake Toss — over 1000 feet! This was done not by a trebuchet, but an “air powered pneumatic device.” Perhaps this could be the gift for the gadget-loving guy who already owns everything — useful for getting rid of unwanted holiday gifts.