This story appears in The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society's student newsletter Professional Preface, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 1.

Be A Junkyard Warrior

Are you a fan of The Learning Channel’s Junkyard Wars? Then you can’t miss JOM’s Rubbish Deconstruction League at the TMS 2005 Annual Meeting & Exhibition.

Where: TMS 2005 Exhibition–JOM booth
When: February 15 and 16, 2005, 12–2 pm

The Rubbish Deconstruction League is a group challenge that entails constructing a solution to a real-world problem, with limited time and resources (literally a pile of junk). Teams of four to six university students, faculty, or industry engineers will participate in two building challenges on Tuesday, February 15 and Wednesday, February 16 in the TMS 2005 Exhibit Hall.

This event will be supervised by Jeff Del Papa, founder of “The Nerds,” the first American team to participate in the Emmy-nominated Junkyard Wars TV show. It is an event where ingenuity, improvisation, and lateral thinking are rewarded. Each challenge will have multiple valid solutions that can be built within the time limit using the materials—junk—at hand. Examples of past challenges include building a machine to play bocce, building a machine to play basketball, and a machine to transport a can of beans over water. Trophies will be presented to the winning teams.

The Rubbish Deconstruction League will be hosted by JOM, the official publication of the 2005 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition and the member journal of TMS. Participation in the event is free, but you must register your team in advance of the meeting.

The number of teams is limited, so register today by contacting Diane Scheuring at (724) 776-9000, ext. 259, or by e-mail at dscheuring@tms.org.