I love these competitions, and have been captivated by them since I was a kid after seeing a PBS special on MIT's Woody Flowers, who organized them. And in hig

I love these competitions, and have been captivated by them since I was a kid after seeing a PBS special on MIT's Woody Flowers, who organized them. And in high school, I designed a project for a state-wide King of the Hill type contest by ignoring the "goal" and focusing on the tie-breaking rules. The idea was to design a car (using a strict list of household items) to run up a two-sided hill and rotate a long, hanging metal bar against a sensor multiple times. Your opponent also had a bar on the opposite side of the hill. You'd get a point for each time the bar hit the sensor. Most people spent a significant amount trying to figure out how to rotate the bar. Most points won, after all. Except that, if nobody scored, the tie breaker was distance; if you made it up the hill further or even made it to the opponent's side of the hill, and nobody "scored", you'd win. My "car" used the maximum allowed number of mouse traps in an attempt to sling itself over the hill as fast as possible and flip the other car or device over, or at least disrupt the opponent's operation enough so that nobody would score, and I'd win on distance. Turns out that the scoring objective was so difficult that this was the winning strategy. Still have the car and the t-shirt, but not the $1000 savings bond. And as popular as sports are in the U.S., I did make more competing in nerd competitions than I did on the track team. :-)