Angry Birds Catapult to Life at MIT

When Physorg.com writes about an MIT mechanical engineering professor as “over the top, crazy, and fun,” you know something notable happened. Most recently, that thing was bands of senior engineering students armed with catapults, giant crossbows, and bungee cords slinging birds—Angry Birds—at water-balloon pigs on Killian Court. Watch the zany video for the live action.

The Oct. 3 event, the brainchild of Professor David Wallace SM ’91, PhD ’94, was part of the senior capstone MechE course 2.009: Product Engineering Processes. The goal was to build devices to launch stuffed birds aloft for a live-action recreation of the popular digital game, Angry Birds.

And what was at stake? The name of the first team to knock its pig off a pedestal and retrieve its eggs was to be engraved on a full-size foam replica of hockey's Stanley Cup. Wallace, a Canadian, may be as crazy about hockey as he is about inventive ways to teach students to design and build working alpha prototypes of new products.

The project was as collaborative as it was competitive, as frenetic as it was fun. Physorg describes it this way: “The teams initially had only 10 minutes to design a device that could hurl a stuffed bird 60 feet. While lab assistants built kits based on those designs, students had only 60 minutes to put them together.”

Read the Psyorg article for competition details and see photos on an Admissions blog post by Matt McGann '00.

Curious about other projects? Check out the Experiments Index for short videos on past years' efforts—human-powered fire-starting machines and hovercraft and apparatus for walking on water.