As UF students sat down for their Monday afternoon lecture classes, about 120 engineering students raced scooters in the first “Electric Scooter Olympics.”
Peter Ifju’s capstone mechanical senior design class participated in the competition during ninth period behind the New Engineering Building on Circle Drive.
The event was a part of Ifju’s class assignment. This assignment requires students, in teams of about six, to take apart and reassemble an Electric Razor Scooter, Model E300.
Twenty student teams and one team of teaching assistants competed in the games. The teaching assistants decorated their scooter with pom-poms, foam horns and a green gator-shaped mat for the body of the scooter.
The placing teams would get to choose a box of candy. The ultimate prize was a trophy of tire-pressure gauges made by Ifju.
Robert Orth, a 23-year-old UF mechanical engineering senior, spent his weekend practicing figure-eights for the event.
“We have modest expectations,” Robert Orth said of his team, “But I’m still shooting for No. 1.”
Despite the daylong rain, students showed up to class with helmets in hand and scooters at the ready.
The rain stopped just as the festivities began around 4:10 p.m.
The events consisted of an uphill race, a downhill race and a figure-eight event. Teams used their knowledge of physics and scooters to help them compete for their times.
Competitors were allowed to push off the ground to start but were given a two-second penalty for every misstep after.
Teams chose their lightest members for the uphill race and their largest members for the downhill race, hoping to use size to their advantage. By the figure-eight competition, batteries were dying and scooters were skidding, but every team managed to finish the events.
Ifju said the Olympics get students to understand the mechanics of the scooter, and to evaluate the performance of each scooter before the project begins.
“We’re actually applying what we learn in school,” said Daniela Soyos, a 22-year-old UF mechanical engineering senior and student in Ifju’s class. “This is breaking down something that’s actually seen in real-life applications.”
The competition lasted an hour. Team 20, consisting of six seniors, won the overall competition after winning the uphill race and placing second in the figure-eight competition.
“The team comprised of the graduate teaching assistants, riding their tricked-out scooter, were utterly humiliated by the younger, more hungry undergraduate teams,” Ifju said.
No students or scooters were injured during the games.
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 9/30/2014]
