SWE Competition

 Feb 15, 2020

Megan participates in SWE (Society of Women Engineers) at her high school and they have been working on building Rube Goldberg Machines for the past few months. There are a lot of girls in SWE so they fielded 2 teams to enter the Rube Goldberg Regional competition.  Megan was putting in a lot of hours after school planning, building, testing and reworking her teams machine. Megan is good at envisioning projects and she is especially good at doing it within a theme. The task that the machine needed to accomplish this year was turning off a light bulb.

The team went with a Monster's Inc theme and Megan was all over it. there is a light that turns on over a childs door when the Monster can enter the room in the movie, so it was a good fit. Megan helped paint Boo's door and created energy canisters and worked a lot of the machine steps into Boo's toys. She scoured our house for toys to use and also went to Goodwill to pick up a few elements. Megan asked Johanna to draw some pictures for an authentic kids room look and they taped they to the wall.

The family went out to watch the competition and see the machines in action. It is a lot of fun and laced with tension as the girls set up the run and hoped everything functioned just right. 

We enjoyed the other machines as well which were Lumos- Harry Potter themed and Back to the Future themed. Johanna loved watching all of the machines get set up, explained, and run. I did too. Megan was nervous about her teams run and disappointed in the little things that didn't trigger. When that happens they can step in and do a "touch" to complete it. the judging is done by women in technical engineering jobs and they are great mentors. Judging is on a points system for categories, like meeting the task parameters, machine components, machine run and steps completed. 

Finally the judging came back and winners were announced. They were so excited to win first place. A bit surprised and also proud. I am so proud of her.