Media Advisory: Carnegie Mellon Engineering Students to Celebrate 50th Anniversary of LEGO Building Bricks

April 23, 2008

Contact: Chriss Swaney
Carnegie Mellon
(412) 268-5776

Event: Carnegie Mellon University engineering students will turn building blocks into functional tools. Denmark’s LEGO is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, so students will create wheeled vehicles built entirely of 100 assorted LEGO blocks, and incorporating standard engineering design principles. John Wesner, an adjunct fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), said the vehicles must be able to haul textbooks up an incline.    

When: 3 p.m. - 4 p.m., Thursday, April 24.

Where: Scaife Hall, room 208,  Carnegie Mellon University, off  Frew Street. 

About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif., and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe. For more, see www.cmu.edu.