We had lots of
contests in
addition to those in aeronautics and the web scavenger hunt.
There was the laser target shoot, building and testing a
toothpick bridge,
periodic table word search, water balloon slingshot, toothpick and
marshmallow tower, an aluminum foil
boat, and the science millionaire game had some of them scratching
their heads. A new contest this year was to figure
out a shape that was hidden from view by rolling marbles at it and
seeing which way they came out. This is the same problem that
early atomic scientists had when they were trying to figure out what
the atom looked like by shooting alpha particles at them.
Some of
the campers enjoyed learning the game of nim, solving Tangrams, and
tackling the 8 queens problem. No prizes for those other than
the
satisfaction of figuring them out.
The home construction
challenge was to
build a tower using pasta that
would have a CD on top like a radio relay antenna. The
"foundation"
was another CD that was bolted down during testing. There was
no
restriction on the kind of pasta or glue and up to 2 pounds of
materials could be used. Of course the taller and lighter the
towers
were the higher they would score. We bounced a laser off the
top
CD and
on to a target so that we could measure how rigid the towers
were.
They were then subjected to a "hurricane" supplied by a leaf blower
with a variac for speed control. The strongest stood up to a
220
MPH
blast but were heavy so they didn't score well. There was a
lot
of thought and ingenuity demonstrated in the designs. The
best
had a good
tradeoff between weight, height and strength. The winner
wasn't
the
tallest, strongest, or lightest but had the best combination of them
all.
