The 6th annual Engineering Machine Design Challenge was held in March at WSU. Two teams of Cotter students competed and were selected to advance to the tri-state championships which were held on April 21, in Anoka, MN.  It was the 2nd consecutive year a team from Cotter has advanced to the State competition under the direction of Cotter science teacher Eric Paulsen.

“The competition was really cool, it was amazing to see all the projects from the other teams,”  Paulsen said.  “I was really proud of our kids. The 9th grade team took 2nd out of the 36th teams in the re-design category.  They are given a new element which they have to successfully incorporate into their machine in a 30 minute time frame with a judge watching over them the whole time. The worked together and worked the element in an ingenious way. It was pretty amazing.”

Participating in the junior high team were The Martians: Zephyr Paulsen, Jacob Moore, William Kirk, Jaxson Greshik, Shawn Freyre, Jack Slaggie, and Carter Knuesel, all 8th-grade students.

Participating in the senior division are The Octo-Cats, 9th graders LeYan Thean, Daniel Gaedy, Nathan Burchill, Erica Beckman, Cooper Christopherson, and Everett Engler.

This year’s theme is “Into Orbit” and teams were challenged to design a Rube Goldberg Machine, which is sometimes called a chain reaction machine. Each team had to plan, build, iterate, and prototype in the most complex ways possible for 10-15 steps to complete.

The junior team built a three-stage rocket that launches a space probe as the final movement. The 9th-grade team built a Mars rover named “Rocky” and its finale is an electrical show with eyes and other parts lighting up after an electrolytic solution completes a 9-volt circuit.

Both teams put in hundreds of hours building their machines, recording their progress in a journal, and creating and presenting a story about how their processes went.

Because they were selected, earning 1st place in the senior division and 2nd in the junior division, the teams went back to work in the recently created TEAMS (technology, engineering, arts, math, science) Lab on the first floor of  St. Joseph Hall, refining and improving their ideas and presentations.