'Trebuchet' Designed By Penn State Abington Engineering Students

ABINGTON TOWNSHIP, PA — Engineering students at Penn State Abington ushered in the fall season recently with a fun game of 'launch-the-pumpkin' utilizing their very own "trebuchet," a type of catapult with a long arm used to throw projectiles.

Students majoring in engineering used their newfound skills to construct the device, which was used during the annual Pumpkin Chunkin event on a field across from the Rydal Building at the Abington-based campus.

The trebuchet can launch items of greater weights further distances than a traditional catapult, according to the school.

Isaiah Wilson, a sophomore studying engineering, says on the school's website that the team designed their trebuchet to handle heftier projectiles.

"We added a crank to keep the arm down instead of using our own brute force to keep the arm in place before we launched," he stated. "The crank shaft is based off of a principle I learned in my engineering mechanics class. It's about 200 pounds of force displaced."

Wilson said that while the designed worked fairly well, the hope is to make it even stronger next year.

"We want to design it to safely chunk the pumpkins," he said.

The trebuchet, sometimes called a "trebucket," is described as a medieval siege engine, or a type of device or weapon used to batter masonry or throw projectiles over walls with its catapult function, according to an article by Science Daily.

It seems to have a history dating back many centuries.

The Wikipedia page for the device says that the trebuchet was a very popular weapon up until the advent of gunpowder.

The exact origins of the word trebuchet are still somewhat ambiguous to this day.