Thomas Jefferson University students will send five-pound pumpkins flying across Alumni Field on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., competing for $500 and a trophy in a brand-new contest dreamed up by the school's engineering program. The event, dubbed Pumpkin RAMpage after the university's ram mascot Phil, is free and open to anyone who wants to watch students' homemade catapults, trebuchets and crossbows try to out-launch each other.
The contest is open only to students in Jefferson's College of Architecture, Design & Engineering program, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Teams had roughly a month to design and build their launchers, which must fit within a five-by-eight-foot footprint, keep their throwing arms under 20 feet, and skip gas power or motors entirely. Each squad runs three to seven members, and the whole thing is extracurricular — no class credit on the line, just pride and prize money.
Twelve teams signed up to compete, but only two showed up for an optional test run at Alumni Field, per the Inquirer's reporting. Todd Kramer, associate dean of the CADE program and the contest's organizer, said he expects six or seven teams will actually be ready to launch by Saturday.
A Crossbow Named Ballista and a Walking-Arm Trebuchet
Among the competitors is Autumn Artillery, a team of seniors in Jefferson's industrial design program that includes student Aidan Harbison and two classmates. The team built a crossbow-style siege machine they're calling a ballista. Harbison, notably, also spent part of this month building an eight-foot-long, 400-pound crossbow with friends outside of the competition, the Inquirer reported.
During the test run, Autumn Artillery's launch of a sand-filled exercise ball traveled only about 10 feet before dropping, according to the same account. Another team, the Liability Launchers, built a catapult-style walking-arm trebuchet in just nine hours and sent their test ball roughly 250 feet across the field — a dramatic gap between the two squads heading into Saturday. Student teams have been practicing with the large sand-filled exercise balls in place of actual pumpkins ahead of the real contest.
How the Competition Works
On Saturday, each team will launch three pumpkins weighing roughly five pounds apiece, with the winner determined strictly by whichever pumpkin travels the farthest. Four teams will advance to a second round for two more launches each, and the top two will face off in a finals round. The champions walk away with bragging rights, $500, and a trophy depicting a raging pumpkin with ram horns, made on a school 3D printer.
Kramer told the Inquirer the contest is meant to let students apply what they've learned in engineering classes to a real, physical build — and that even a launch of just five feet can teach something. He's reportedly hoping the event becomes a signature fixture for the university and creates a block-party atmosphere on campus, with Jefferson professors even considering entering their own device.
Punkin Chunkin's Bigger, Messier History
Pumpkin-launching contests as a concept date back to 1986, when the World Championship Punkin' Chunkin' Contest started as a local bragging-rights battle in a cantaloupe field in Lewes, Delaware, the Inquirer noted. That event eventually grew into a spectacle with dozens of teams and 25,000 spectators, run annually through 2011 and sporadically after that until it was discontinued in Delaware in 2016 following a personal-injury lawsuit filed by a Science Channel producer who was critically injured by a piece of an air cannon.
Those bigger competitions have historically used a wider range of launcher technology than Jefferson is allowing this weekend. Per Punkin Chunkin's official rules, categories elsewhere include trebuchets, catapults, torsion machines and air cannons, with air cannons capable of shooting pumpkins more than 4,000 feet using compressed air; trebuchets instead rely on a counterweight attached to an arm that swings the gourd from a sling. Jefferson's rules ban both gas-powered devices and air cannons outright, keeping Saturday's contest firmly in mechanical, human-engineered territory.
Similar contests have popped up at other schools, too. West Texas A&M University holds an annual Punkin Chunkin event where engineering students and local high schoolers build catapults judged on accuracy rather than raw distance, according to the Amarillo Globe-News. In one past contest there, teams aimed at targets set at 25 feet and 25 meters, and Team 4 edged out the Chunky Monkeys for the overall win by a single point. Jefferson's version skips the targets altogether — distance alone decides the winner on Saturday at Alumni Field.
