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Check out the Rope Climbing Exercise Machine that one of the student teams in the WCU College of Engineering and Technology<\/a> developed for their capstone project! The project was sponsored by Smokin’ Joes (Joe Anderson), an entrepreneur and business owner in Niagara Falls, New York. The team started with the initial design that Joe has patented and optimized its performance.<\/p>\n Dr. Martin Tanaka, the faculty mentor for the project, said the rope climbing machine uses a series of pulleys to make climbing easier than pulling your own body weight. “The device is designed so that the difficulty can be adjusted by turning a valve. So, it can be used by people ranging from elite athletes to those new to rope climbing,” he said.<\/p>\n Because it uses muscles in the upper body, people with lower limb disabilities can use it too. Jake Wallace, a U.S. Army veteran, and one of the members of the team said that it would be great to help disabled veterans who still want to stay fit but don\u2019t have as many exercise options. Other team member Sarah Kathryn (SK) Smith, William Shore, and AJ Saks said that they learned a lot about product development, business, and innovation during the year long project. During the winter break, SK even got some help from her dad, also an engineer.<\/p>\n “Overall, I was so proud of the team,\u201d Tanaka said. \u201cThey really pulled together and took ownership of the project. The sponsor was impressed by their work and is already thinking about the 2.0 version!\u201d<\/p>\n LEARN MORE<\/strong><\/p>\n Learn more about WCU’s Engineering Capstone Symposium projects<\/a> (including the Rope Climbing Machine<\/a>!)\u00a0 and how to become a capstone project sponsor<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “The device is designed so that the difficulty can be adjusted by turning a valve. So, it can be used by people ranging from elite athletes to those new to rope climbing,” said the student team’s faculty mentor Dr. Martin Tanaka.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3401,"featured_media":9772,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[85,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engineering-symposium","category-wcu-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3401"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9778"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9866,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9778\/revisions\/9866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/cet-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}