MIT students meet PAC-THING: The lesson in this annual engineering contest is not in if you win or lose, but in how well you design

Early in the morning of November 21, 1983, a standing-room-only crowd jammed the largest lecture hall of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. They cheered wildly as 180 students battled head to head in a 4 foot by 8 foot sandpit until a single victor emerged. This was not a takeoff on Dungeons and Dragons or even a remote cousin to mud wrestling. These combatants were engineering students earning course credits in an engineering design course by taking part in a yearly back-to-basics engineering contest initiated by Professor Woodie Flowers, course coordinator.