Students bring their creativity to life in this engineering design project as they design their own ANW obstacle.

This project is designed to include many aspects of a Mechanics of Materials course, which is called Stress Analysis at WPI. This is a sophomore level course, and I use the project with a class of 90 students. The project is currently divided into 4 submissions in which students complete the following:

Submission 1: Design a novel American Ninja Warrior obstacle and draw multiple FBDs of their design
Submission 2: Analyze one or multiple parts of the obstacle to calculate stresses due to axial tension or compression and torsional loading
Submission 3: Analyze a part of the obstacle to calculate stresses due to bending
Submission 4: Analyze a part of the obstacle under combined loading to calculate stresses at multiple locations on the critical section.

In addition to the technical analysis, student teams develop a written proposal and a sales poster for their design.

To facilitate the 90 student class, teams are divided into groups of 6 that are subdivided into groups of 3. A schedule of the subgroups interactions is included in the overview project description. The final submission subgroup interaction was changed from the original plan from the project overview to allow students more freedom in their group work. This is explained in the submission 4 document.

Groups received instructor feedback on the first three submissions. Each of the first three submissions counts for 50 points and the final submission counts for 200 points. The overall project accounts for 20-25% of the student's grades. I may increase that percentage based on all of the work the students put into the project.