Engineering students came in fourth place in the annual Punkin’ Chunkin’ Competition on Friday, Nov. 1. 

The team finished the competition two feet short of a bronze finish.

According to engineering teacher James Rayburn, the throwing arm of the trebuchet snapped into three pieces on the second throw.  The team had to rebuild the arm from spare parts.

Prior to the competition, the students built a scale model of their trebuchet and then built a full sized model to take to the competition.

The competition is won by launching three different pumpkins at three pins and seeing how close the team can get.

The distances from the pumpkins are then averaged and put up for the team’s score.

 Rayburn was happy that he was able to take his students to the competition at West York High School.

̈My goal is that they experience the engineering design process and are able to compete and compare their abilities to other students,̈ said Rayburn.

The students got to work as a team and compete with 11 other schools.

Senior Andrew Beamesderfer enjoyed the challenge of the contest. 

̈In general, just I loved just working on and building the trebuchet. It was so weird because I would go from normal classes like English to Rayburn’s room to put together a machine capable of launching a pumpkin like 200ft away, ̈ said Beamesderfer.

Senior Ben Knepper enjoyed working with his team.

“The reason for our success last year and our good placement in this year’s competition was that our team worked well together,” said Knepper. “We were able to come up with a plan, execute it, and decide on changes if needed.”