Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 4 Winter 2018 | Page 7

From left: Alex Walker, marketing
and communications manager with
Lockheed Martin, Jason Lazar,
Maxwell Baum, and Wade Titterton,
all seniors in mechanical engineering,
and Brad Fravel, director of business
development with LINK, the center for
advancing industry partnerships at
Virginia Tech.
ME students
unlock
challenge box
In September, three mechanical engineering seniors Jason Lazar, Maxwell Baum,
and Wade Titterton, cracked the code to unlock Lockheed Martin's Challenge Box and
were rewarded with $10,000.
“Jason and I had just watched three different people answer the fourth question
wrong right in front of us, so we weren’t too hopeful when it was our turn,” said
Baum.
Baum analyzed the problem and recruited Lazar and Titterton, and the three decided
to tackle the challenge together.
Students were presented with four tough engineering problems on a touchscreen
display, the fourth being the key to unlocking the grand prize of $10,000. While the
other three problems changed each day, the $10,000 question remained the same and
was in fact, an actual problem that Lockheed Martin engineers were confronted with
in the field while designing one of their military satellites.
In all, 802 students attempted the problems and 98 walked away with a special prize
for answering one of the first three questions correctly. The prize was a vinyl disc
replica of The Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and
images from Earth that NASA sent into space via their Voyager spacecraft.
https://youtu.be/z5dSfE4Ufj0
VIDEO
MOMENTUM
FALL 2018
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