I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else- Mason Cooley
The Hollywood movie image of a scientist almost always includes a laboratory - tables of mechanical instruments, glass beakers, notebooks full of strange writings and, in more modern times, computer screens with fascinating graphic pictures or columns of numbers. The laboratory is, quite literally, the workplace of many scientists.
It is often difficult to study science in natural settings because many different conditions might affect what the scientist is trying to study. For example, a biologist trying to study the growth of tadpoles might have a hard time doing so if large fish were eating the tadpoles, or if there was a dry spell and the pond was drying up, or if it was winter and the pond was freezing over. A good laboratory allows the scientist to create and control the conditions of the system being studied, simplifying things by keeping some conditions constant (not changing) so that they will likely not affect the system and at the same time adjusting some conditions to see how or if these variables (things that change) can cause changes in the laboratory system. By studying these interactions, the scientist can often come to understand how some aspect of how the world works.
An engineer uses a laboratory in much the same way a scientist does, learning how to control the behavior of things - in this case usually things that the engineer has created - by controlling variables in the laboratory. The next step is to use the information gathered in the laboratory to predict and/or control conditions in systems outside the lab.
The Daredevil Design Project is a student project involving the exploration of a simplified 'laboratory' system, the manipulation of gathered data using computational tools, and the application of the information gained to predicting the behavior of a synonymous 'real' system. The system in question involves free flight of an object from a jump ramp - an analog to the canyon-jumping stunts of motorcycle-driving daredevils.