Students from Engineering 102, Introduction to Engineering, and College of Engineering faculty took part recently in a "Meet and Compete" event modeled on NBC's game show, Minute to Win It.

Miranda Gearing successfully gets the M&Ms elevated and eaten, and progresses to the next round.

Student teams were given 60 seconds to complete a given task, and advanced to the next level if successful. Those familiar with the TV game show would have recognized the 1-minute tasks that students attempted: Candy Elevator, Tipsy and Bobble Head.

Jane Hunter, associate director of the Engineering Management Program took on some of the emcee duties. "We received a Student/Faculty Interaction Grant to bring first-year students and faculty together for a little food, fun and competition," Hunter said. "We wanted to get students and faculty interacting in a less formal setting than the classroom."

All the participants received a t-shirt commemorating the event, which was the culmination of a new unit on energy, water and the environment. "We received an ABOR Learner Centered Education Course Redesign Innovation grant," Hunter said. "So we used the ABOR grant to develop a hybrid unit that included classroom and online components." The UA Office of Instruction and Assessment was instrumental in the successful development of the new course materials, Hunter added.

For the Candy Elevator, students had to balance M&Ms on pencils suspended from strings hooked over their ears. They then had a minute to winch up the M&Ms and eat them, without touching or dropping the candy or pencil.

Hector Paz balances three partially emptied soda cans on their edges, while Edgar Rivera Morales (left) and Khaled Alshaalan look on, and qualifies for the Bobble Head challenge.

Each team sent the winner of the Candy Elevator competition to the second challenge: Tipsy. Students had to drink the precise amount of soda from three cans that would allow the cans to balance at an angle on the bottom lip. The first six successful teams then advanced to the final task, Bobble Head.

With pedometers strapped to their heads, team members shook their heads as fast as they could and read the pedometer counts at the end. The highest score was an astonishing 227.