Around Halloween, many people have fun with pumpkins - they carve them, bake them, paint them, and generally employ them in various dishes and decorative capacities. The Freedom HS Engineering Club members had different ideas for their pumpkins, though. They used them as projectiles, and at the club’s first Fall Festival, they launched them from a slingshot, a catapult and even two trebuchets.

The festival took place on a Sunday afternoon outside of Freedom, and the event’s primary focus was the “Punkin Chunkin” contest, in which four groups had three hours in which to devise mechanisms intended to hurl pumpkins as far as possible. Each team had at its disposal wooden beams, screws, nails, and other necessities for construction, and every squad came equipped with hammers and drills.

At the end of the allotted building time, the groups displayed their inventions and demonstrated their abilities in front of a crowd of approximately 50 enthused onlookers. The farthest pumpkin travelled around 40 feet, out of the basket of the slingshot.

When the participants were not designing their modified medieval siege engines, they got to enjoy two other activities: a raucous and messy pie-eating contest and a paint-your-own-pumpkin contest. Hungry engineers were kept well-supplied with complimentary caramel apples, and spectators snacked on vittles from the festival’s bake sale.

The Engineering Club organized the entire event in just two weeks. All proceeds will benefit the club, which is in its infancy. President Sean Boyer says that the group will use this money and its revenue from future fundraisers to purchase a 3D-printer and to finance “real-world field trips” to local companies like Lutron and Air Products. Sean, a sophomore, formed the club with his twin brother Adam because they had had fun doing projects after school with Alexandra Roscher, the club’s faculty supervisor, and they wanted to make those same opportunities available to all students.

At the club’s meetings, students learn about engineering and its real-world applications, and they also apply for school and personal grants and scholarships related to engineering, since the overwhelming majority of the club’s members want to pursue careers in the STEM fields.

The students, who are mostly freshmen and sophomores, still have plenty of time to carve out their career paths. But that Sunday, they had a more important goal in mind. As Roscher put it, “Really, this was just an opportunity to get the kids together to build and have fun.”

They succeeded on that count, smiling and laughing with their friends. Oh, and they built massive, complicated contraptions, putting into practice the principles that they have learned in the classroom. For the members of the FHS Engineering Club, it was as easy as (pumpkin) pie.