Pedestrian Access Game - Winner of 2013 James H. Kell Award

By Mr. Danny Nguyen posted 06-20-2014 03:02 AM

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With the next Western district conference fast approaching, I felt it necessary to write a piece on Sacramento State's response to the James H. Kell Award. If you're unfamiliar with his name, he's mentioned over here. The RFP can be found here as well.

In summary, it's a competition for students hosted by students that's supposed to get us to use our transportation engineering knowledge and judgment to beat out everyone else. Cash prizes are intended to cover the travel costs of the winning university's contingent. In return, the winning university hosts the Kell Competition prior to the official start of the conference.

Faced with this conundrum, there were several concepts that would be optimal. First would be to use locally available materials, as is in civil engineering. The venue was somewhere on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore, most likely a room of some sort. Ideally, it must also be an easily-approachable game - something that everyone can play without too much of a learning curve. Audiovisual equipment is nice, but requires some setup and there's increased chance of things going wrong. For the items that we needed to bring, those also had to be cheap enough to buy and compatible with travel restrictions since we were going by airplane. Last (and perhaps most importantly), it needed to be transportation-related.

The time had come to delve into history. Sacramento State won the rights to the Kell Competition back in 2006, just seven years prior. In their submission, they outlined a playable area with remote-controlled cars and road obstacles. The goal was for one team member to pilot the car through the obstacle course, designed- no, engineered by the rest of the members on the opposing team. The faculty advisor said that was a decently successful and well-received competition. Teams would be eliminated tourney bracket-style.

Originally I envisioned a scaled-up version of the competition format true to my origins of speedwalking (to be discussed in the future). Instead of RC cars, people would be playing themselves in a bigger play area. That would also boost visibility naturally and not require any video projectors. For obstacles, chairs and tables would be used since all of us were to be in a hotel. As for transportation engineering, since this game is pedestrian in nature (hence the name), the concept of choice was effective lane width, or the minimum transverse distance a pedestrian has to navigate a walkway. Sure, a typical residential sidewalk may be four feet wide, but place an electric wire pole through the sidewalk and the effective lane width would be cut down to two feet. Same thing with the Pedestrian Access Game: despite a large width of playing area, the path engineered by the other team is small and limits movement.

However, there was still something missing. Racewalking through obstacles is about as fun to spectate as any other race. This is where my colleagues and faculty advisor - Reaa Ali, Ariana Castillo, Russel Oyewole, and Dr. Kevan Shafizadeh - come in, and I credit the event's success to them instead as I just set up the foundation. To start, Dr. S (abbreviated as the name is hard to pronounce if you haven't heard of it before) proposed that racers be blindfolded. After some consideration it seemed like a much better idea, and would open up completely new avenues of strategy and hilarity as well. Other suggestions consisted of time bonuses as well as penalties available for both teams to take advantage of.

The final product was something that is functionally similar to MIT's Agnes the Aging Empathy suit - allow other people to somewhat experience the plight of blind pedestrians, in this case navigating an obstacle course while blindfolded, but using a wooden sight cane (purchased at Home Depot). To add more strategy, the building teammates had the option of either helping the allied pedestrian navigate the course, or distracting the opposing pedestrian. Time bonuses were awarded through picking up pieces of candy (introduced in the second round of match-ups) and an upright glass symbolizing a drink of water (in the final round). Penalties were given for stepping out of the playing area, disturbing the obstacles, and stepping on potholes (another obstacle introduced in the second round).

At last, game day had arrived. The allocated room couldn't have been better suited for our Kell Competition. The floor was carpeted with large squares which made marking of the playing area easy. Chairs and tables were already there in plentiful supply. Cloth napkins did outstandingly well both as blindfolds and (silent) potholes. All we had to do as judges was make note of clear time along with any adjustments.

Before each round, I'd always hear from a Cal Poly Pomona professor that X team would win solely based on the terrain, which tended to be based around making the minimum width paths be as long as possible within the playing area. What he didn't account for was the help-or-distract dynamic from the rest of the teammates. Some teams vigorously engaged in distraction tactics, complete with shouting false directions, yelling loudly, and even singing in unison. Other teams took different approaches to helping tactics, such as only listening to directions from a female voice, only listening to directions in the right language, and so on.

In the end, one team was left standing and zero physical injuries (much to my relief, I had brought along a medical kit just in case). Some students were left shocked at the experience, but overall I hope that experience comes in handy at some point in their professional careers. Overall the competition was wildly popular both with students and the Local Arrangements Committee alike, and nearly everyone stayed behind to watch the chaos well past our allotted timeframe.

That said, I await to see what the next university (likely U of Wyoming, since we narrowly beat them out according to reports) has in store for us in the coming weeks.

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