Once again, this year's group of "pre-engineers" came up with unique projects. Adam Meisel, for example, had big plans for his B.E.V.E.R.A.G.E. machine... well, we're not really sure what his project was supposed to do, but he had fun reclaiming solenoid valves from old washing machines at the municipal dump... 
    Ken Drewes designed a computerized checker-playing robot which automatically moved checker pieces around the board.  Joseph Glessner created a fully automated "Stock Allocator," which moved furniture in stages from raw lumber to finished furniture, while Dyna Hin tried to create a CD Jukebox that would mount selected CDs into a CD player.
    His main competitor, Sam Martin, built a CD Organizer-- but this one worked!   Jeff Viens envisioned an automatic chess player, and Kevin Liggan constructed yet another CD Jukebox-- three altogether this year, each with very different design characteristics and rates of success.
     Rich Chin's plotter  was supposed to draw and write on paper, but he had a few "technical difficulties" designing  the pen holder...   Another impressive game robot was Mark Benninger's TicTacToe robot, which automatically placed "X's" and "O's" around the base of his robot, cleverly disguised as a TicTacToe board.
    If you were to ask any of this elective class's participants, they'd very readily tell you how challenging the course is, but quickly add words like "fun" and "rewarding" to the description.
    You can help support this wonderful experience:  We're always looking for old, "dead" dot-matrix printers, discarded disk drives, CPU's and CamCorders-- they're a valuable source of motors, gears, belts, pulleys, tracks, etc.  If you have some old equipment that you don't need any more and would be interested in donating it for use in the course, kindly contact Jack Bozzuffi at 856-264-5644.