Experience This

Ya Can't Lose! A Great Parade and A Great Solar Car Unveiling!

2010-03-14T23:05:15Z

Rain, snow, wind, fog, drizzle, nothing keeps thousands of people from jamming Pine Street for the annual St. Pat's parade in downtown Rolla. Loyal S&T Alumni from all corners of St Louis set their computers for "out of office", and head down I-44 for this annual symposium dedicated to remembering how hard they studied during their four, five, six or ? years in "The Middle of Everywhere."

S&T's resurgent Solar Car Team used a mysterious shrouded object to tease the crowd into coming to the 3:00 p.m. unveiling of Solar Miner VII, which will spend the latter part of June running in an international qualification race, followed by the American Solar Challenge. This crew assembled a great group of speakers who talked about the 100+-year history of electric cars (so you think it's new stuff, eh?), the visionaries who started solar racing, and how the incredible designers of the Solar Miner series have carved out reputations as some

of the very brightest stars in this story. The current group might seem kinda quiet, but to look at the time-lapse video of their four-month build cycle you'd know this is a hard-charging crew. After the formal unveiling dozens of solar car alums and fans surrounded Christina Jung's teammates to ask "why'd you do this?" Shouldn't you do this? How are you going to egress from the underside? Why not weld this piece shut? Why is that seam there? How'd you incorporate green carbon fiber and kevlar?" And on, and on, and on.

These folks are, after all, engineers. Or married to one. Or descended from one. Or think they are one, and that's what engineers do. Ask questions. Analyze. Argue. Agree. Break it. Fix it. Figure how to make it better. Or more complicated. Or simpler. Or just different.

Meanwhile, the green beer got warm.

St. Pat's Is A Big Weekend in Rolla

2010-03-11T20:14:44Z

So your first response is "Well, DUH!"

Everybody knows about painting the streets green, the Follies, Gonzo Games,manure spreader, coronation, honorary knights, the parade, dozens of couches sprouting on the lawns, porches and sidewalks all over town, and glasses lifted high to mourn the passing of "Alice".

St. Pat's is also a milestone for many of S&T's student design teams. Most groups plan to have their projects at least operational by mid-March so they can get on with testing, and some are scrambling to make that goal. We already know that AAVG's rocket is ready to go, the concrete canoe floats, Formula SAE broke traction on their car last night and the Human Powered Vehicle's prototype chassis is done and tested and the fairing is nearly complete. No word yet if Baja will run their car up Pine Street in Saturday's parade, but the BIG story is Solar Miner VII, S&T's redesigned solar race car.

SMVII will be ceremoniously unveiled 3:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon in Leach Theater of Castleman Hall. Solar car alum, fans, and team members will gather to toast the team that helped put S&T's vaunted design teams on the international stage, and celebrate the fact that the 2010 solar car race will swing through Missouri.

This sleek new design won't look much like its ancestors, and that's all we're permitted to say at this point. It'll ride in the parade on a flatbed trailer flanked by team members, but like at the GM testing grounds it'll be shrouded and unrecognizable. Think of it as a tease..................

Come to the unveiling ceremony! Help support the students! Volunteer to work the overnight stage stop in Rolla on June 23rd~

Formula SAE Team: One Project, Three Perspectives

2010-03-11T14:10:30Z

Design team projects are complex operations, and that fact is certainly true of S&T's world-ranked Formula SAE racing team. The car is an intricate device made up of many different systems, and the student personalities on the team definitely mirror that fact. In any organization variations in opinions expand exponentially as the number of people involved increase, and even having a successful launch (last night!) of the 2010 car won't make everyone see things the same way.

If you don't believe it, here's a truncated version of this morning's email thread:

A: Team-

The car had it's first drive tonight! All systems checked out with flying colors and we're all set for a good weekend of testing. Now the fun stuff starts. Thanks again, let's keep up this awesome teamwork and drive the hell out of this car now.

Mike Eckert
Chief Engineer

B: Let's all clean the shop! Don't go and mess up the red tool box; Justin Andrew's organized everything in the socket space.

Thanks,
Doug Hoang
2010 Engine Leader

C: Great job guys! Keep up the great work! (But don't forget to go to
class, too.)

Prof P
Advisor to the World

Advanced Aero Vehicle Group Set To Launch Rocket

2010-03-10T02:45:27Z

When you build a 10 ft-tall rocket, you can't just pick a nearby public park to test it. Should it explode or go out of control the collateral damage could be a little messy. If it goes too high you'll quickly find that the FAA, TSA, Homeland Security and all other federal alphabet agencies don't have much of a sense of humor.
Last week the AAVG rocket squad had to cancel a long-planned test launch near Elsberry, MO because the spring thaw left the site too muddy to reach. The "rain" date is this Saturday, when hard-core aero students pass up the St Pat's parade and other liquid festivities to head to far-off Pittsburg, KS. Apparently even commercial aircraft avoid that Gorilla-infested area so it's perfect for sending large darts skyward. After all, if you shoot down a Jayhawk, it's OK. There's no bag limit or closed season, and if you cross the line back into Missouri there's even a bounty on 'em.

We hope to have photos from the weekend trip, but in the meantime team leader Mike Crance tells us the team has christened the three project vehicles.

The rocket is Zephyrus, the Greek god of the west wind.

Advanced Class airplane? Favonius, one of the Roman wind gods, who held dominion over plants and flowers and was generally equated with the Greek god Zephyrus.

Micro Class Airplane--Pluto. A cartoon dog.

Down To The Sea In Ships.

2010-03-08T00:17:25Z

The S&T Concrete Canoe Team's 2010 gestation came to a successful conclusion over the weekend under the watchful eye of Rubber Ducky. The little character spent nearly a month floating inside the canoe in water designed to slow the curing process. Keeping him company were several concrete test samples manufactured at the same time the boat was poured. These cubes, which will be used as competition test material, remained floating during their long immersion, proof that the concrete mix is lighter than the water volume it'll displace.
That's a good thing, because it means the boat should easily pass the dreaded swamp test at April's contest in Oklahoma.
Once the Miners drained the boat and (hopefully) cleaned up the mess they made in the shop, it was off to nearby Little Prairie Lake for the maiden voyage, and that's when the heavy lifting started. This craft weighs well north of 150 pounds so moving it can be quite a challenge. As sturdy as it appears it is brittle so dropping it could be disastrous; neither time nor budget would allow S&T to start from scratch again.

Once the intrepid engineers slid the boat into the shallows, they ALL breathed a sigh of relief, but then the next step was "OK, who's gonna get IN this thing?" Since no volunteer offered to take one for the team, Team Leader Arch Creasy was quickly nominated. Arch had such great confidence in the group's design, material, and construction that he immediately did three things: demand a life preserver, hand his cell phone to someone staying on shore, and wish that he'd worn warmer clothes. He apparently settled down once team mate Rachel Kautz agreed to take the stern, and eventually got over the "leadership jitters". The two of them did a short loop around the cove, and the team unanimously decided to store the boat back in the trailer and get down to the real reason the went to the lake: grilling burgers.
There's still a lot more work to do before the team heads to the regional competition. They have to polish the boat, their paddling techniques and their oral and written presentations, and touch up their flashy Missouri S&T display stands.
Stay tuned, and stay dry.

Prepare to Launch And Recover Aircraft

2010-03-07T21:32:50Z

It doesn't take a groundhog to know that this winter has been long, cold, and dark, and that cabin fever has been approaching epidemic proportions in Rolla. Friday's hint of above-freezing temps had S&T apartment- and frat-dwelling students moving the furniture out on the lawns as if life might actually return in this lifetime.

The prediction of real sunlight and mild weather helped kick start design teams into high gear, and while Siren, S&T's latest human-powered vehicle is not quite ready for full-contact practice, the HPV competition team moved out to the Brewer Science grounds Saturday for some-much-needed practice. S&T's two-wheeled rockets don't have landing gear, so

it takes a finely-tuned start and recovery crew to get 'em going and stopped. Former team leader Whittney Metcalf has started training newer team members in this highly-synchronized art form, because it is extremely embarrassing to ride the most high-tech bike on the course, only to fall on your side at the start. She has S&T Patrick, the Miners' 2008 bullet, standing in for the yet-unfinished Siren during these rehearsals. S&T Patrick has a lot of miles on it, but is still in great shape and makes a great training vehicle, not just for the riders, but for the pit crew, too. Whittney is leaning hard on the riders and pit crews to get this right, but this group is FOCUSED on the mission ahead.

S&T Formula SAE Update

2010-03-01T03:32:46Z

Stephen Hill, business manager of the Miner Formula FSAE team, found this publication and sent this note to his fellow crew members:

Team:

I was checking out the SAE Collegiate Design Series 2009 Year in Review and thought it was really cool how often our team is featured. For those of you that do not yet know, our team is recognized quite often, especially in the report of our victory at FSAE Virginia. Our # 8 car is pictured more often than any other university's design team!

Check out pages: 1, 12, 14, and 19.

Let's get this car done!

Stephen Hill
Missouri S&T Racing
fsae.mst.edu

Stephen is right! Scroll through the report and take in the glory! Last year the Miners' flashy vehicle was even pictured on the Michigan race's official t-shirt.

2010 Winter Olympics Continue In Rolla

2010-02-28T22:45:00Z

Just when you think you're done with pairs skating, half-pipe and the skeleton (huh?), you find out that NBC hasn't bothered to cover the Olympic synchronized canoe paddling finals.

Tucked away in the decidedly unfrozen S&T pool is a dedicated group of STUDENT-athletes practicing the exquisite moves of coed canoe racing. The Miner Concrete Canoe Team is about halfway through the month-long curing process for their 2010 boat, and they aren't just sitting back watching cement dry. Each Sunday this crew adjourns to the S&T pool for an hour of upper-body workouts to build the strength and style they'll need to push their heavy craft through the regional ASCE competition's slalom and endurance races.

Team Leader Arch Creasy coordinates this exercise that includes three-member male and female contingents, as well as a 4-member combined team of two men and two women. Their April event is not a race in the normal sense, but a way of proving that the end product of a sophisticated educational challenge actually works as designed. Each engineering team designs and builds a boat of unorthodox material, which for 2010 includes recycled glass and plastic beads. They present their engineering designs to industry professionals for evaluation and feedback, much like they will do in their careers. Each team also gets to study their opponents' boats to see if maybe there isn't another concept that they overlooked, and that, too, is a learning opportunity.

The actual races, while largely serious to the participants, DO have a high fun element. Some teams are highly disciplined, some paddle so furiously that they swamp their own boats (think Black and Gold), and some schools (specifically the state just south of Missouri) seem to think they can earn extra points for high comedy.

10,000+ Flock To S&T Design Team Displays!

2010-02-23T02:19:08Z

Well, that's not quite the whole story, but follow along with us for a minute, wouldya?*

Late February marks Engineers Week across the country, and the Missouri Society of Professional Engineers (MSPE), in conjunction with the St Louis Science Center, celebrates the event with a weekend of interactive displays for kids of all ages.

Engineering and technology firms, schools, and government agencies, all involved with infrastructure, health care, and energy issues, show off the programs and wares that will make our lives better. Who better to do this than the enthusiastic future engineers from Missouri S&T?

Friday night the advance guard of S&T's thirty-strong volunteer contingent moved samples of the Miners' top design projects onto the main stage of St Louis' popular Science Center, and set up the largest (by far) scientific display of the event. World-ranked Formula SAE, Human Powered Vehicle, Engineers Without Borders, Steel Bridge, Concrete Canoe, Solar Car and Solar House, Robotics, Baja Racing, and Advanced Aero's rocket and airplane gave young kids a taste of the fun and excitement of doing "cool things" while studying science, technology, engineering and math.

Rounding out the SDELC projects were Miners In Space, S&T's chapter of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), and the ever-popular Materials Advantage group that turns kids on to the magic of frozen ping-pong balls and marshmallows. Everyone seemed excited to watch liquid nitrogen-cooled plastic balls spin wildly when returned to room temperature, and realize that despite some misgivings from the youngest fans, frozen marshallows are fun to eat.

The ANS crew used some ancient civil defense radiation detectors to show visitors that many everyday objects (including people) exhibit low levels of radiation, and had a great display. A paper-suited Chris Crook kept more than a few people off guard by approaching them waving a geiger counter.

Adults AND kids got to try out a recumbent racing bicycle, courtesy of Trent Lauer and the Human Powered Vehicle Team. The older kids (the ones who shave), are usually uneasy about sitting back on what looks like a shiny board, but all are surprised at how comfortable the elongated bike seat actually is. Little do they realize how technologically efficient the unpadded back rest is. Riders are able to lower their wind resistance and get more power out of their legs, all in a package that is fun and easy to ride.

The "sleeper" at the show HAD to be Christopher Smith of the Baja SAE team. Chris' big friendly smile would almost insist little kids hop in the car for a simulated off-road adventure that started something like this: "What's the first thing you do when you get in a car? That's right! Buckle up!!" As soon as his passengers got buckled in the five-point harness, Chris would thrash the car sideways, then hop on the back and yell "OK, now we're going rock crawling!!", while jumping on the rear bumper. And if that weren't enough, he'd holler "OK, now we are going to drive up the STAIRS!!!" and pick the front axle to chest height and drop it over and over for each rider. The kids' beaming faces said "Oh, WOW, this is what I want to do when I grow up!"

Chris was not only the the hardest worker of the Miners' volunteer crew, but of anyone in the whole building. His antics attracted the biggest crowds to see their kids having such a good time, and when the occasional soccer mom dared to ride, the laughing audience got even giddier. Hoarse and bone-tired after two days of showmanship Chris snoozed through the ride back to Rolla late Sunday evening.

*The Science Center folks were ecstatic over the weekend's attendance, reporting Saturday: 6,078 people through the doors Saturday, and nearly 4,000 on Sunday for a two-day tally of 10,071, almost a third higher then the '09 count.

Note to Mizzou: When an autonomous S&T robot comes poking around your display areas, covering up the machine's high-tech sensors with a bag won't do any good. You have to go to the top of the stairs and take the Wii remote out of a grinning Rolla student's hands.

It's Actually Gonna Happen! Kummers Cap Off New Design Center Building Fund!

2010-02-16T21:15:10Z

For more than a decade S&T's premier student design teams have accomplished great things, including three national championships and a top-ten world ranking, all while operating out of a cramped, dirty, and under-equipped garage. These successes have earned the Miners great respect from the public, peer institutions, industry, and especially from S&T alums who know the value of hard work and experience.

Fred Kummer, CE '55, CEO of St. Louis-based HBE Corp. and his wife June, firmly believe that S&T students have earned better facilities, and are backing that conviction with a $1.25 million pledge to establish the Kummer Design Center.

The original design center idea was spearheaded by three other S&T St Louis-area civil engineering alums: Richard Arnoldy, '69, retired CEO of ARCO Construction Co.; Robert Brinkmann, '71, founder and president of R.G. Brinkmann Construction Co.; and Barry Koenemann, '70, CEO of United Construction Ent. Co. Other recent major project donors include Michael Bytnar, ME '68, retired president of Nooter Corp.; and the Sunderland Foundation of Ashgrove Cement Co., Overland Park, Kan.

This spring Missouri S&T will begin renovating the old Miner Recreation Building located on the corner of 10th Street and Bishop Avenue to house the new center. This project will transform an eyesore at one of Rolla's busiest intersections into a top-tier facility that will house the staff and offices of the Student Design and Experiential Learning Center, team offices, meeting areas, and best of all, drastically-improved production facilities for each SDELC student design group.

Design teams only have to endure two more competition cycles ('10 and '11) in the old shop. Look for groundbreaking ceremonies scheduled soon, and a move-in date of Summer 2011!

We'll post photos of Fred and June soon, and we're also gonna find a great way to show the building's progress. In the meantime you can read the official news release here

PLEASE, design team students, friends and alums, please post your comments here about what YOU think this gift will do for S&T and our fabulous students.

So, You Wanna Build A Concrete Boat , Eh? And Race It? Yeah, Right!

2010-02-12T15:32:38Z

That's a challenge that S&T's Concrete Canoe team takes on each spring. The intrepid civil engineering students spend the fall semester raising money, buying materials and building a massive form from which a surprisingly delicate boat will eventually emerge, and if you think it can't be done, you're wrong.

Under the watchful eye of "Lucky", S&T's 2008 boat, a pumped-up group of students carefully mixed, sprayed, dumped, and otherwise hand massaged layer-upon-layer of what looked like thick pancake batter on the sides and bottom of the mold, but kinda like building a dam, once you start you have to keep going.

Saturday's pour had to factor in a new design element because event organizers decided to go "green" for 2010. Teams qualify for extra points by replacing gravel with recycled glass beads and plastic chips for the critical aggregate. Great idea, except for one tiny detail; the angular plastic pieces caused havoc with the critical spray system. No sooner than uberorganizer Matt Struemph made sure everyone synchronized their measuring, mixing, weighing and cleaning motions, the first spray gun (Plan A) jammed. No worries, have someone clean it and use the backup gun (Plan B). Same result. Repeat the process for an hour until stress-induced sweat becomes part of the slurry ,and then dust off long-forgotten Plan C*. "Pitch the spray guns! Dump the stuff in there and start smoothing!" became the order of the day. It soon looked like a pizza joint on Super Bowl weekend as shoulder-to-shoulder workers applied the first ?" layer and topped it with a layer of reinforcing mesh. Then repeat the process until the hull is nearly ? of an inch thick, and collapse, exhausted.

During this organized chaos someone had to pour small sample cubes for strength testing that will become part of the engineering report. Those samples will also tell if the mix is lighter than water (after all, it DOES have to float) and so far that seems to be the case.
At day's end the entire the boat is filled with water. A leak test? Hardly. A long, slow cure makes the concrete stronger. How long a cure? The craft reaches 90% strength in twenty-eight days. If you want to follow the process check out the canoe webcam here.

Yeah, it IS like watching paint dry, but the real fun starts when they extract the boat. They only have one shot at getting this right, so let's pull for 'em. More later.

*Plan D? Call the local ready-mix company.

It's Official! 21,000+ Visit Missouri House; Most Visited On The Mall!

2009-11-02T20:23:26Z

David George of Team Missouri tells us that Solar Decathlon officials have released the visitor head count of all twenty solar houses, and Show-Me Solar came out #1. All told MissourI hosted 21,402 guests!*

Maybe we were wrong about excruciating waiting lines at many of the homes. Usually the longest lines snake out of the winning houses in what we always figured was a popularity contest, but now we realize that our home was so open and spacious that we were able to "process" many more visitors than any of the other structures. The Miners and Tigers (Migers? Tiners?) posted students at several points throughout the home to answer questions about the energy systems, "green" materials, design philosophy, and interior decor.

You can call this a housing contest, but the hidden agenda really is public education, getting people to understand that we can support our (sometimes) ostentatious lifestyles in an energy-efficient way. In that category Missouri was the clear winner, edging Team Spain by about 80 pair of feet. There were something like 305,000 overall house visits, which works out to an average of 15,250 per house. Missouri beat the median by better than a third!

*This informal award harkens back to the inaugural decathlon when Home Depot cited the Miners for the "Best Customer Service". HD lauded S&T for the enthusiastic and well-organized way they hosted public tours. Led by the indomitable Allison Arnn (now Allison Casem), the first solar house team fanned out along the line of visitors to describe the home's design philosophy, keep the guests entertained, and otherwise talk themselves hoarse while making the wait seem short.

The Last Thirty Hours At The Solar Decathlon

2009-10-20T01:40:59Z

Hundreds of people have sent in cards and letters asking "what happens when the Solar Decathlon is over?" The answer is simple..........open up the event to the teeming masses, er, public, we mean.

Thousands of people patiently braved Saturday's rain and Sunday's chilling north winds to tour all twenty homes, kinda like a real estate agent's worst open-house nightmare. It was so crowded organizers kept a big display board that gave times estimates for waiting in line at each site. The bone-weary Show-Me crew played perfect hosts to a steady stream of wide-eyed strangers, all of whom asked the same questions over, and over, and over and...................so by 5:00 p.m. all you can repeat is, "yes, our beautiful cabinet doors are made of sorghum straw waste products." The upside of all the company is that so many folks commented on how open and spacious the Missouri house was compared to some of the other structures, and one perfectly charming little Italian woman said "oh, this is the house for me! The kitchen is just perfect, with lots of light. I just love it!"

Right at 5:00 p.m. the crowds melted away until Team Missouri set out all the landscaping plants, and then it was a feeding frenzy. We couldn't put them out fast enough to the grateful public, and some people even said "no, not that one, the red one next to it!" Anyway, it was better than hauling them back to a Missouri winter.
And then, as the night crew staggered back to the Mall, disassembly started in earnest.

First the shade louvers came off, and as night fell the deck did, too. By 3:00 a.m. the night crew had removed the huge deck, and by the dawn's early light the evacuated tube system was, well, evacuated. Surprisingly, few other teams worked through the first night.

Morning was mostly site clean up while we waited for the first trucks to arrive, then it was a case of "lift 'dat barge, tote 'dat bale" and get the deck sections loaded on the truck. The Miners couldn't do much to the house itself until our western
neighbor Rice University craned their house directly over Missouri airspace onto another trailer. That was a great time to evacuate the site and slip out front for a quick crew photo with team advisors Dr. Katie Grantham (S&T), six-week-old Logan G, and Mizzou's Barbara Buffalo.

The crane arrives tomorrow to lift the roof just enough to swing in the north window wall, and then they'll raise the house high enough to drive the second truck under it, set it down, secure it, and hit the road until 2011.

We keep referring this amazing group of undergrads (you listening, California?) as "the team", and that barely describes it. This group works so well together as to defy description. No drama, no tension, just go about the work as if it were no big deal. These Miners and Tigers (oh, my!) clearly enjoy each others' company and work as a unit. Everyone pulls their own weight and no one seems in charge because everyone simply takes care of business. Do they have fun? You bet, every chance they get!

Darmstadt, Germany Edges Past Illinois, Takes Decathlon; Team Missouri 11th

2009-10-16T13:42:16Z

The Illini were the sleeper team this year, bringing an unassuming barn-like structure that would make expat Champaign/Urbanna grads feel right at home. Recycled barn siding formed a simple exterior that hid a well-designed home that took 1st place in Appliances, Hot Water and Home Entertainment, and narrowly lost to Germany in the all-important Net Metering contest. Germany (pictured at right) slipped by Illinois by winning the Net Metering contest by 12 points, just enough to move into the winner's circle by 11 points. How did our Hessian friends do so well in power production? Simple. They covered the entire skin of their building in solar panels, a slightly understated techno look that would be very popular in Europe, and a hugely powerful source of electricity.

California, which held first place until the last days, had a great house but maybe the Karma got 'em. They made multiple claims, all bogus, they were the only undergraduate team on the Mall. CNN bought that nonsense without checking, and to our knowledge Cali still makes that claim on their website. We'll quote a recent S&T grad who works in the Cali desert (and who just happens to be from Illinois) who wrote last week that:

"I now live and work with these Californians, and they just don't seem to grasp that they aren't the best at everything. It just takes being beaten by "those dumb old country folks" from the Midwest for them to learn who the real engineers are. Keep it up, Solar House. I'll make sure to clear up the confusion next time I run into a Santa Clara grad at the office ;)"

Show-Me Solar hung in there for a respectable 11th place, right behind Ohio State and two slots above powerful Virginia Tech. The team is understandably disappointed in their engineering and architecture scores, but as one participant asked rhetorically "those architecture comments were like reading ones from another house & we can't appeal a subjective contest. ugh!!!"

In the judges' defense you have to keep in mind that this biannual event comes together with hundreds of staffers in roles outside of their normal jobs. The judges are expected to have the wisdom of Solomon and the data retention of an Excel spreadsheet, but YOU try walking through twenty innovative homes and keeping straight which feature went with which house! Obviously errors are going to be made, especially in the subjective events. Rumors are even swirling that officials were debating changes in this year's contest as late as last night.

Here's a quick salute to Illinois, whose more traditional style home (below) is an indication of how much the 2009's Decathlon entries actually looked like homes compared to '07, when to this writer's eyes, there were an awful lot of "bank branch" buildings out there.

More News From The National Mall

2009-10-15T17:37:47Z

Here are some updates, both from team members and the public.

First of all, Monday was a federal holiday, and a Solar Decathlon visitor told us that the Decathlon site was so crowded you could barely get inside any of the houses.

Second, even today the lines to tour solar homes are long, despite cold, rainy and windy weather. Apparently busloads of local high school students descended on the site today.

Most important, Show-Me Solar is creeping up in the rankings with two contests yet to go. Luke Sudkamp reports that

"WIth the cloudy weather we've turned off all unnecessary systems so we can maintain our temperature"

"We got 8th in lighting, tied with 3 other teams, and the architecture jury comments got back to us yesterday too. The best comment was that the light fixture in the bedroom didn't match the ones in the rest of the house. In reality, they are exactly the same it just has reading lights built in that you can't see."

Luke goes on to say "there was a team-only open house program last night so it was really good to visit the other houses and all their ideas."

In the meantime pre-contest favorite Virginia Tech, which led S&T by just two points yesterday, has dropped to 16th place and Illinois has, for the moment, snatched the lead from Team California (see blog story from Oct 10th, below).

Back to local highlights, Congresswoman Emerson was by for a tour Wednesday, and we understand that Representative Carnahan took time out his busy schedule to see the house earlier in the contest.

Engineering scores will be released tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m., and net metering will round on the scoring, and along with any possible penalty points, determine who will win the overall event.

Keep your fingers crossed!