FRONTIERS: Were you excited or daunted by entering your respective contests?

LOGAN: I was intimidated by the Canadian team, because they had a really fast boat and they were really professional about what they were doing. The Michigan team had a really cool boat, too. They pulled off a lot of really complicated engineering stuff that we didn't want to mess with. I was pretty impressed. But I didn't really see the whole thing as a competition. I was trying to see if we could get the boat we built to go. We got second place, so, we did pretty good.

Will (front) feels the heat of the MIT competition.

WILL: I was pretty psyched up about it because I'd been involved in a similar type of contest years before. In the MITES (Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science) program, we had a contest where we had to build a robot and we were competing in a very similar project. I did very well in that, but at the end, my robot got stuck. It was something where I had been dominating in practice all the time, I really went into it confident, but then got knocked out earlier than expected. After that, I just wanted to redeem myself somehow

SARAH: I was excited, but I was also intimidated by it because I'd never really built anything like a machine before. I didn't know basic simple things, like how to mount a motor, make something move. But once I got going, I started to realize that the things I was making were working. I got more confident and more into it.

FRONTIERS: Where do your ideas come from?

JUSTIN: I always try to get to the root of the problem. Looking at how to improve the speed of the boat, from last year's hull design to this year's, I tried to go the simplest route I could. I always try to take it to the lowest level possible and build up from there. Look at the very, very small parts of it, and build up to the larger goals by adding everything up together.

LOGAN: : Ed Leibolt, my mentor, has been building boats a lot longer than I have. Ed talked about it a lot and gave me stuff to read. When it came time to actually design and build the boat, I knew a lot just from talking to Ed and other people who built boats.

For the submarine, every year, everybody has to submit their design outlines. We went over some outlines of boats from previous years and just looked at what worked and what didn't work and we focused on reliability, We maximized the simple, reliable designs.

WILL: We had brain storming groups where we just tossed ideas back and forth for the first couple weeks…Initially, I had a whole different plan. I had a lot of time to practice. I realized, "this is not going to get me as far as I'd like." So I actually changed the whole plan in the last week.

My robot had a little car that originally had magnets on the base of it and it was going to roll down to the base and then winch the end down. In the short amount of time allowed - 45 seconds - that car proved to be too hard to steer. So I turned the car into a really heavy weight and added an extension pole to the part that flipped out. I wasn't afraid that I wouldn't get it done in time, but I wanted to have enough time to practice with it. Some people have good machines, but if they don't know how to work them well, it really doesn't matter.

SARAH: While we were trying to come up with ideas, we'd test things. We made a little hook, and we were seeing how strong it was and how much force it took to pull down as opposed to doing other things. A lot of people were experimenting with the magnets, but I liked the carpet grabber the best. It seemed like you needed very little force. One hook seemed pretty strong and I ended up having 15-20 hooks. It seemed like a reliable idea.

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