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Going Down With the Ship Sophia Popova ’11 and Kenneth Leveille ’11 (at right, with bubbles) were the makers, captains, and, ultimately, victims of their own small craft in the Yale Engineering Design Team cardboard boat race on September 15. The undergraduate group holds the race every year, partly for sheer fun, partly to give students some hands-on design experience.
Participants have four hours to build a two-person craft out of cardboard and duct tape. "You get a pretty good idea of the engineering principles involved in building a boat," says Design Team president Jonathan Hartman '09, "when you put it in the water and it tips over because you left something out.” Some boat builders had
prepped with complex physics equations, but Popova says she and Leveille built
by intuition. They wanted a canoe-like boat with a wide base; other than that, "we
absolutely didn’t really know what we were doing." It worked, though. They finished
the full half-lap in Payne Whitney’s main exhibition pool afloat and without
help—only three out of eight boats managed that—and tied for first
place (47 seconds). After winning, says Popova, “we sat in it until it finally
sank.” |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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