The TechnoBrain Competition was conceived 20 years ago by the late Neev-Ya Durban, then a student at the Technion Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. It was called The Eggcopter, in which the obejective was to throw an egg from a great height without breaking it. In that first competition, the eggs were dropped from the roof of the highest building at the Technion. Now they will be dropped from a balloon 40 meters (131.23 feet) above the ground.
Durban, who founded the competition out of a desire to challenge the Technion students with creative engineering tasks, said at the time that “competitions were born to get the students away from their textbooks and computer screens and give them a platform for creative expression while coping with the challenge of the competition — complex problems in a fun atmosphere.” Durban took his inspiration for throwing an egg from a great height from the Mars Pathfinder project — the first landing of a probe on Mars in the summer of 1997.
Neev-Ya Durban
