- November 20, 2025
- By Robert Herschbach
As “Wicked: For Good” hits theaters Friday, University of Maryland engineering students taking a machine design course will be launching ideas—not to mention flying monkeys—inspired by the franchise.
They’ll do so with help from a completely different but also wildly popular franchise, working within the Nintendo game, "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom." Using the video game’s surprisingly robust design capabilities, the undergraduates will build robotic versions of the film’s iconic airborne primates, which will first walk and then transform to fly.
The monkeys are a new twist on the final team project that Associate Professor Ryan Sochol, a pioneer in game-based learning for engineering education, has made a cornerstone of the mechanical engineering course since the 2023 release of "Tears of the Kingdom." As before, students spend the semester designing a bio-inspired, reconfigurable robot, modeling it with computer-assisted design (CAD) tools, building it in the Zelda environment, and finally testing their designs during an in-class race at semester’s end.
Sochol, interim director of the Maryland Robotics Center and director of the Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing Lab, got the idea while watching the first “Wicked” movie; its creatures aligned perfectly with his final project’s objective of engineering a bio-inspired robot that gains new capabilities by reconfiguring its components.
In the Wicked scenario, this means students create a robot that initially walks like a monkey, but later—after reading a book of spells known as the Grimmerie—transforms to gain the power of flight.
The new focus hasn’t changed the philosophy behind the course: Sochol aims to teach machine design principles in a way that’s engaging and fun. The creativity and ingenuity students invest in their projects, consistently going well beyond the requirements, underscore the effectiveness of that approach, he said.
When modeling their robots in CAD, for instance, students often take the time to add exquisite details, such as notches and teeth that aren’t required as part of the assignment, but reveal how deeply they’ve embraced the project.
Using Zelda as the design environment also yields the thrill of discovery, Sochol said, because the physics of the game universe differ from those of the real world. Like young Isaac Newtons, students must figure out how the laws of this alternative universe work. For example, the law of energy conservation doesn’t always hold: A spring mechanism, instead of dissipating energy, may instead acquire new energy from an unidentified source.
“They’re learning the physics of an alternate world and designing machines that operate within it,” he said. “In doing so, they not only reinforce their understanding of real-world physics, but also gain valuable experience thinking critically about how machines work.”
Sochol received this year’s E. Robert Kent Outstanding Teaching Award for Junior Faculty for his impact on student learning and engagement in the A. James Clark School of Engineering, and presented papers on the course at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conferences in 2024 and 2025.
Ryan Sochol