Architecture students are tackling one of their biggest challenges ever: a set for the South’s BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) Robotics Championship, which will be held this Saturday at Auburn University’s Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum.

The project which spanned five weeks, according to Casey Canouse, a freshman in pre-architecture, is going to feature aeronautical objects, like planes, a hanger and clouds. She said, “But it’s not any ordinary set. It’s actually made out of plastic, and it’s giant and it’s inflatable and it’s going to fill up the coliseum.”

Peter McInish, also a freshman in pre-architecture, said, “Well, our project, is dealing with cost in terms of we need to make it cheap because we don’t have that much money, so, we’re inflating gigantic forms.”

After receiving the project, the class divided itself into groups. Each group is working on a different part of the set. “For instance, my group is constructing planes out of building plastic,” McInish said. “And so, right now, we’re working on designing the actual planes and how we’re going to rig them up and things like that. It’s a lot of work.”

He continued, “There’s this beautiful irony to what we’re doing because it’s this monumental effort, but yet we’re creating things—these huge forms—just out of air, so it’s just kind of a neat experience, and I think once we get it up there, we’ll be really proud of what we can accomplish.”

Canouse also commented on their work over the semester. She said, “Projects so far have been really crazy, like we’ll get really big projects over a span of two days. They just keep us busy all the time, and the volume of work is crazy. But it’s really cool because it really changes the way you think about things, and the way that you can design—like your design process and the process of thinking and the way you view things in the world."

According to McInish, the semester has focused on hand-on experiences. He said, “It’s been very informative about the design process and how time consuming it can be—getting us to think in new ways has been critical in what we’ve been learning—learning more so by doing than actually just seeing how something is done and copying it.”

The competition which will be held Dec. 13, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. will host fifty teams of middle and high school students and their robots. The robots, which were winners at local-level competitions, will compete in competitions related to the aeronautical theme.

The competition is an annual tradition, cosponsored by the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and College of Science and Mathematics at Auburn University (COSAM).

The event is free and open to the public, but you can also view the competition on the live stream that will be on COSAM’s website, http://www.auburn.edu/cosam.

For more information about the South’s BEST competition, visit http://www.southsbest.org. Students interested in Auburn University’s architecture program can learn more by visiting the School of Architecture’s website, http://www.cadc.auburn.edu/soa.


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