The eggstravagant physics competitions of first semester comes to an end.
January 16, 2018
Physics and Honors Physics students competed in the annual Rocket Egg and Poke Projectile Launcher final semester project competition on Thursday after school.
The goal of the Physics project is to make a car that travels 50 cm, which will trip a laser sensor, and then catch an egg that falls from a height of 1 m. This laser is what releases the egg from this height.
The goal for Honors Physics is to make a projectile launcher that uses a Pokéball (tennis ball) to capture a Pokémon at several distances. Honors physics students fired their launchers from the MPR stage and the pokémon was between 2 and 12 m from the stage.
In both classes, students are graded on producing a working car or launcher and showing their knowledge of physics concepts like velocity, acceleration, and force in terms of their work.
Students in both classes started working on their projects shortly after winter break and were excited to finally get to see their work in action.
“I was excited for the competition because we worked hard on our car so I was excited to see results and also I’m hoping this project will improve my grade,” junior Abigail Amidzich said.
Others were hoping to win the competition for the thrill.
“I was excited for the competition because I was hoping my team would dominate. We worked on it for only one day because that’s all the time needed to be a champion,” junior Ismail Ademi said.
Some even are just excited to see the competition.
“I was excited to see all of the other teams and how creative they got with their cars,” senior Jamie Wage said.
In order to do well on this projects students needed to use concepts they learned throughout the entire semester.
“Students benefit from connecting concepts from our entire semester in terms of one situation,” science teacher Zachary Geiger said. “In addition, I think that self-managed work on a project with a group of peers more closely relates to real-world initiatives than other assignments. I believe that these projects give students a chance to plan, create, and troubleshoot on their own terms which is challenging and rewarding.”
Wrapping up the Rocket Egg project senior Victoria Dahlman and her team the Eggstellerators won the award for best team name, and the team consisted of seniors Sally Kalchbrenner, Annie Pulizos, Julia Beres won the award for best team spirit.
“We decided to go all out with our costumes. Our team name didn’t have any obvious costumes that would go with it, so we decided to be philosophers because their ideas confused us and our team name was ‘We are eggs-tremely confused’,” Kalchbrenner said. “Not many people dressed up, so winning this award wasn’t too hard, but we had beards, so even if other people had dressed up I think we would’ve won.”
The winners for the best Best Egg Shield Computerized was made up of seniors Esme Contreras and Alexis Masino and junior Nathan Sroor. Best Engineered Car was made up of seniors Nick Kuehn, Michael Miksic and Alex Waterstraat, and the Best Decorated Car was made up of seniors Kata Jaksic, Kennedi Wierzba, Corinna Pitt, Natasa Prostan and Kennedi, Wierzba