Champaign County Economic Partnership recently hosted the second annual Champaign County Design Challenge. Students from Champaign County Schools with an interest or knack for design and engineering were selected to design and build a mobile, mousetrap race car. They were partnered with engineers from local manufacturers who gave direction, answered questions, and judged projects at the school level. They were given a limited number of supplies and basic requirements to complete the racecar.
West Liberty-Salem shop and sculpture students, Jared Shoemaker, Connor Smith, and Tucker Ridenbaugh, were selected to compete at the county competition at Urbana University. Their mousetrap race car competed against cars from Urbana, Triad, Mechanicsburg and Graham. While they did not advance beyond the county level, the experience exposed them to different career options in engineering and introduced them to local manufacturing jobs at the Champaign County Economic Partnership’s Design Manufacturing Trade Show.