New reality challenge achieves the improbable

“THE BIG BRAIN THEORY.” Makes engineering, problem-solving and invention exciting.

Last Saturday morning, we caught a new reality challenge on the Discovery channel, “The Big Brain Theory,” that made our viewing day, because it achieved the improbable—it made engineering, problem-solving and invention exciting!

That’s such a welcome relief, after all sorts of silly and even stupid shows that “dumb down” both contestants and viewers. So we urge you to watch the TV tilt as well, in order to make it a “sleeper” success that other TV producers may want to emulate.

When we watched the show, it was down to its last four surviving finalists, most of them inventors in their own right. They were competing in the tilt, because the grand prize is a much-coveted design and engineering job in a top firm.

What makes the TV tilt more inspiring to young viewers is the fact that one of the four remaining finalists is a comely young woman who’s still a college student. Despite her youth and relative inexperience, she’s faring very well in the competition due to her acute analytical ability, her skill at breaking complex problems down into “solvable” bits and pieces—and her competitive “fighting spirit.”

Thus, last Saturday, she was chosen to be the leader of one of the last two teams standing, because her design was adjudged the best solution to the difficult task at hand—to conceptualize and build a device to prevent runaway cars from breaking through a checkpoint, forcing guards to shoot at the runaway vehicles.

The student’s design was adjudged the winner, but that was just the start of her ordeal. The two surviving teams now had three days and only $5,000 to actually build their security inventions—which meant practically no sleep for everyone involved!

But, trust eager inventors competing for a great career-making job to do what it takes to make their dream a reality! The two teams did meet the deadline—and both of their inventions succeeded in stopping those runaway cars in their tracks.

So, who finally edged the competition out, by a nit’s nose? The judges decided that the student’s device was the winner, because it was more original than the other team’s invention, which was “inspired” by the system employed on aircraft carriers to “catch” landing jets in giant “nets.”

That win sets the stage for the tilt’s finals tonight, when the last two survivors will be given an even tougher design and construction problem to crack.

We hope that the young student’s luck holds out, because her victory will make other young people see that, in some instances, success is not a matter of experience, but of being ready to creatively take full advantage of their first big break when it comes—and confidently ride it, all the way to victory!