Engineering majors have all the fun, don’t they?

Galen Moore of Bostinno reports.

MIT Kids Built a Campus Roller Coaster and Here It Is (Pics, Video)

Last week, I wrote about an MIT student working at Formlabs, who 3D-printed a scale model of a roller coaster. The best part of the story is that the roller coaster was to be built on campus.

I thought, “that’s amazing!” Of course, it’s important to check assumptions like that. Turns out campus roller coasters have been some kind of institution at MIT, particularly at a handful of dormitory buildings called East Campus. Students there had taken a four-year hiatus due to concerns raised by Cambridge city officials after they saw the 2010 iteration of the East Campus roller coaster. Dubbed “Reverse Cowgirl,” it had passengers strapped, face-down, to the underside of the car. Take a look, if you don’t believe me.

Anyway, it turns out 3D printing had nothing to do with the roller coaster’s triumphal return to East Campus in a glorious, 130-foot-long ride that makes up in elegance and ambition where it falls short of “Reverse Cowgirl” in sheer terror. Student Ben Katz just printed the model for fun, he told me.

Here’s a video.