As every Halloween vandal knows, there is an art to smashing pumpkins. A demonstration of this creative crash between vegetable and pavement was held in the Iowa State Center parking lot on Tuesday afternoon.

Welcome to the Smashing Pumpkins project, an idea conjured up by Iowa State design professor Bill Boon to spark creativity in students and to get them to learn the process of coming up with a solution to a problem.

“The students have been assigned to build devices that will shoot, sling, hurl, launch or catapult the pumpkin of their choice the furthest distance,” Boon said on the project for his Design 129 class.

A crowd of nearly 150 people gathered in the snow-covered parking lot at 2 p.m. to watch the display of events as the students tried their luck at moving their pumpkins from point A to point B.

One student’s invention attracted the attention of several students and television cameras with its loud cannon-like boom that filled the air when it launched the pumpkin.

“It’s like a potato gun, like the kind we used to play with when we were kids. Same idea, but we expanded it to fit a five-pound pumpkin,” said Chris Juhl, a junior in community and regional planning and creator of the “pumpkin gun.”

After having no luck trying to power the gun with propane gasoline, Juhl found the perfect solution: Aqua Net hair spray, which is the spray with the highest percentage of alcohol he could find.

Students used a wide variety of methods to smash successfully. Several used catapults made with rubber ropes and wood. Others used white trash bags filled with air to carry the pumpkin to the other end of the parking lot.

Three students worked together to use people power to move the orange veggie. They passed it in a running figure-eight pattern down the pavement until the end where they let it fall to the cement.

Some students had the satisfaction of seeing their pumpkin soar for several feet before dropping and smashing, while others could only coax a pathetic 3-inch roll from their inventions.

Fortunately, the class is graded on how involved they are in the project and what their process is, rather than their success, Boon said.

“This is not a product class. We look more to try to solve a problem, even if they fail doing it,” he said.