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Awesome, but was he awarded the prize? I was in a similarly poorly specified contest in the 6th grade. The goal was to take a single large sheet of constructio

Awesome, but was he awarded the prize? I was in a similarly poorly specified contest in the 6th grade. The goal was to take a single large sheet of construction paper and build a paper airplane. The only metric was distance covered and weighting your plane was allowed. Day of the competition everyone else in class has their planes out, while I'm standing around with a sheet of paper. When it was my turn I promptly balled up the paper as tight as I could around a handfull of 1" steel washers and proceeded to throw the thing across the gym, out the doors and into the hallway outside, roughly 2x the distance covered by the closest competitor. I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons.

Timothee 16y ago
I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons. In my experience, most teachers really don't like smart-asses. Devil's advocate will say that the accelerations you submitted your imaginary passengers were way too strong. My story in that vein was in PE: we were to run 20 minutes at the most constant pace to practice our endurance. The grade was taking into account the regularity of your pace (13 points out of 20 if you hit the exact same time for all but the fastest and slowest laps) as well as your average speed (the remaining 7 points). Not being the most athletic guys, a friend and I went on our way to run 4 laps of exactly 5 minutes to insure a decent 13 out of 20, where a lap should have been in the 30-45s range. Obviously, our little stunt was not really appreciated. :)
dagobart 16y ago
I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?

Timothee 16y ago

I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons. In my experience, most teachers really don't like smart-asses. Devil's advocate will say that the accelerations you submitted your imaginary passengers were way too strong. My story in that vein was in PE: we were to run 20 minutes at the most constant pace to practice our endurance. The grade was taking into account the regularity of your pace (13 points out of 20 if you hit the exact same time for all but the fastest and slowest laps) as well as your average speed (the remaining 7 points). Not being the most athletic guys, a friend and I went on our way to run 4 laps of exactly 5 minutes to insure a decent 13 out of 20, where a lap should have been in the 30-45s range. Obviously, our little stunt was not really appreciated. :)

dagobart 16y ago

I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?