Choi, Maranto, and five other ASME student members designed the prototype and rented space at Hacksburg, a community makerspace workshop located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, where they did most of the project labor. They could not work in a campus lab, due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Choi said he used some ideas that he gleaned from a dynamics of machinery class to inform the device’s design. The students used four metal bars that link together and on which the cutouts move, and they attached a crank arm to each row.
“It’s definitely nice to be able to take something out of the classroom and apply it to real life,” Choi said. “You get to learn a lot more along the way than simply reading it from a book.”
Two batteries power the eight rows of moving cutouts through the second half of the game.
The students visited Cassell Coliseum several times to…
