Students test their know-how
By Burl Burlingame
at the Physics Olympics
Star-BulletinOK, it's not Picabo Street flying down a mountain, riding a knife-edge between glory and disaster, but the ninth annual Physics Olympics held Saturday had its share of excitement, indeed it did. As several T-shirts proclaimed, "PHYSICS IS PHUN!"
Take Sara Lipka of Kalaheo High School. She spent days designing and then crafting a model bridge of glue and basswood strips, and then, at the Olympics, a bucket was hung from the center span and slowly filled with metal weights. She watched carefully as the tiny bridge creaked minutely and writhed microscopically. Then ...
BANG!
The bridge vanished in an explosion of flying basswood.
"Hmmmm," analyzed Lipka.
By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
BEFORE: McKinley High School students, from
left, Kyong Kang, Rex Lee and Min Hwan Shin, watch as a
bridge is tested for strength. Weights pulling from below
applied stress to the student-made structures.
"Whoa -- good one!" said high-energy physicist Brenden Casey, who was the guy putting weights in the bucket, which he now weighed. "It held 4.38 kilos before exploding. Excellent that it exploded. Means that it was evenly stressed.""Hmmmm," responded Lipka. If her skull were transparent, you'd have seen the gears going like mad: No obvious weaknesses in the design meant that improving it would be a matter of incremental changes. She'd have to think on this.
And that's the way it goes at the Physics Olympics, an inter-school competition in which the basics of science and engineering are put to a real-world test. Hosted by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Society of Physics Students, the event was held at Kapiolani Community College.
Winners are sent to a national competition.
By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
AFTER: The structure collapses into a pile of
basswood sticks. Students from St. Louis High School took
three of the Top 4 spots in the bridge competition.
The only part that needs advance prep is the bridge-building, which has to meet strict standards. One size basswood only, has to measure exactly so wide and so high, has to allow a ping pong ball to roll freely down the central road bed. Just like sweaty sports events, there were judges and entrants in each others' faces, hotly debating the rules."Boy, some teachers and parents really get incensed, too," said University of Hawaii and KCC instructor John Rand, who chaired the event. "I've seen some real shouting matches. But the science competitions are just as interesting as sports. Which gets covered more?"
There are something like 120 kids here, 24 schools from all over the islands, public and private. "This is completely unexpected -- so much fun!" said Leinani Hashida of Mililani High School, which eventually swept the event.
Jake Hudson, another KCC teacher, carefully measured and weighed the bridges -- we're talking errors of millimeters and micro-grams here -- and let the kids know if they had "a legal bridge."
If so, it was tested to destruction. Most didn't go as spectacularly as Lipka's. Some flopped, or popped, or just sagged until they were disqualified for deforming too much.
Other events:
Vectors, in which the spin of a needle allowed kids to advance a board across the floor closest to a target, adding and subtracting angles, like a hybrid game of tacking a sailboat and playing 21.
By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
Castle High School students, from left, Kimberly Ikemoto,
Kuulei Mukawa and Dan Yoshimasu race to figure out how
electrical circuits are connected.
Ian Robbins, 18, of Kapaa High School, however, tried to tape a long tail to the egg and suspend it so it only had to drop a few inches. The referee objected, and Robbins shrugged, wrapped the tape loosely around the egg and dropped it. It survived.
"Hey, it works," he said. "I kind of wish there was more of this kind of stuff when I was in school -- I'd have been more interested in science. The Snell Equation is one of the fundamental equations in physics; you need it to make optics of any kind."
Back at the bridge-busting, there's basswood shrapnel everywhere. Lipka is still watching. Lipka's teacher at Kalaheo is Jim Redmond, who "pushes the hard sciences pretty hard. For some kids, it may be their last exposure to hard science their whole life." He's sounding pretty confident: Kalaheo has swept bridge-building the last several years.
Redmond finds his classes pretty evenly divided between boys and girls, and it's a level playing field, he says. "Events like the Physics Olympics take some of the mysticism out of physics.
"The education system tends to pre-select kids in elementary school, and many are steered away from math and science. It's a 'cruise' mentality in our society -- school is designed to let kids cruise, when it should be challenging them."
"I'm thinking or either becoming a veterinarian or a psychologist, not a physicist," said Lipka. "But physics is genuinely interesting. And using equations to figure out weight and strength for the bridge is pretty interesting too. I worked it out carefully, and made drawings."
Alex Arnote of Kalaheo -- one of the other kids describes him as "awesome smart" -- places his bridge on the stand for test demolition. It has been disqualified on a technicality, but he want to see where it fails. But he's so nervous that Lipka relieves him at placing weights in the bucket.
It fails unevenly: One side is intact, the other shredded. "Hmmm hmmm hmmm," he said. "I was afraid the weakness might be in symmetry. It is aesthetically pleasing, though, isn't it? But this design has to be exactly even on both sides, or it stresses unequally."
Another student, John Burt, cannot be there, but has sent his model bridge, which is both attractive and strong. A shame: It is disqualified because of minor weight and dimension variances. Their own bridges now history, Lipka, Arnote and Neil Timmerman -- whose own bridge held an astounding amount of weight -- race the clock to modify Burt's bridge.
"Feet, that's all it needs to rise 2 millimeters, feet on the corners," declares Arnote, and they cut and glue frantically, adding feet to the bridge.
The new feet, oozing Elmers, bring it in under the wire. They start adding weight. "Why am I doing this?" wonders Timmerman. "What if he beats me, and I helped him do it?"
"Doing it for Kalaheo," says Lipka.
"Good old Kalaheo," mutters Arnote.
"Yeah, OK" said Timmerman.
But while the bridge holds a lot of weight, it shatters early. Two St. Louis High School bridges take first and second, while Timmerman takes third. Kalaheo is displaced as bridge-building champ. And that's the thrill of victory and the agony of de feet.
Winners' circle
Winners of the 1998 Hawaii Physics Olympics:
OVERALL
EVENT WINNERS
BRIDGE BUILDING
American Association of Physics Teachers
