Rethink the Rink Make A Thon

Rethink The Rink is a week-long make-a-thon where CMU students work on innovations to make the game of hockey safer without changing the game.  The make-a-thon has inspired innovations for the dashboards and helmets used in the game of hockey. These are innovations that get implemented firsthand by the Pittsburgh Penguins.

For this year, the focus was on the glass and the stanchions connecting the glass. Those panels and stanchions are the reason for 33 percent of the injuries caused in Hockey.

Ebrahim Karam, ETC class of 2022, was part of the purple team and focused on replacing the Plexi panels with a more flexible and scratch-resistant material. The team also focused on making the connecting stanchions more flexible without extremely altering the current design.

Purple Team won the Best Overall prize and their ideas are now sublicensed by Covestro and the Pittsburgh Penguins.