This competition, held by Sandia National Laboratories, consisted of three New Mexico universities: New Mexico Tech, University of New Mexico, and New Mexico State University. The primary purpose of this year’s competition was for the student teams to design and build an acceleration switch that needed to follow many specific guidelines and be able to collect data output from the switch.

            Of the many guidelines and challenges that the switch presented, a couple of the main ones were that the switch had to be able to withstand 15 Gs of force, it had to be able to sense once the acceleration had reached a certain point, and it had to be able to close the switch once that point was reached. New Mexico Tech’s team of engineers consisted mainly of mechanical engineers. The seven students were: Mateo Sanchez (overall team lead), Ethan Darnell (mechanical team lead), Meghan Cephus (electrical team lead - main coder), Ben Brown, Kyle Mace, Elijah Morris, and Tyler Mobraten. The team was supported by faculty members Dr. Curtis O'Malley, Hollis Dinwiddie, Kevin Wedeward, and David Siler, the team’s mentor from Sandia (as well as NMT alumni).

            An email sent out to the Mechanical Engineering department cited “the technical merit and creativity of the design” as the reasons that our university’s team pulled ahead of its competitors. A couple of the students claimed that this project even gave them a better handle on time management and persevering. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year’s competition was slightly more complicated than it has been in past years. This was mainly due to the need for social distancing, although the team pushed through and made a device prototype that brought them home the win! While this year’s team did amazing, we are constantly striving to do even better next year!

- by Eleanor Rightley