Loopy Family Feud

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to work with students from middle school; today, I had the change to work with high school students. For both days, they found out what engineering really involves and did simple competitions in various engineering disciplines. For civil engineer, they built a bridge from K'NEXs and tested how much weight it can withstand. For computer software engineering, there was a debugging competition.

For Systems engineering, they built a "roller-coaster" which only had to consist of one loop and the team with the largest loop-to-cost ratio won. It was interesting what the students did with foam pip insulation cut in half, masking tape, toothpicks, and of course the marble acting as the cart for the roller-coaster. The majority of the students did a conventional vertical roller-coaster loop but since the requirements didn't specify many groups created a horizontal loop. The teams that made the horizontal loop definitely had the advantage since they didn't have to fight gravity as much as the other teams. And the students tried to get an edge when reducing costs too; this included using their name tags to reduce the cost of tape and one team even used someone's shoelace to hold up their loop. It was extremely competitive and was enjoyable to see how it went.

During the past two days, I observed a few things. Some teachers were much more involved than others; you could tell which were science/math oriented. Not many of the students have had much hand-on projects in their educational career which is disappointing (but there were a few that competed in science competitions as I did in middle/high school). While talking to a teacher that taught for an engineering-career focused high school program, he mentioned that there weren't that many students that continue it after being introduced to it in middle school (and there were even less females. And the females that are in the program aren't very interested). It's difficult to analyze why that is though. But the most obvious thing I noticed is that kids that age didn't change much from when I were their age. You have students that love competitions like this and others don't; there are kids that take charge and dominate the conversation/project; there are students that plan out what they are going to do thoroughly and others just go at it.

But to the exciting news you have been waiting for a couple days! Today was the Championship Game for Family Feud, "No Pressure!" against "Mission Possible" (Sadly "The Five Brothas" did not make it after losing in a tight battle last round). After determining that the survey of the game were completed in the 1980's, each team had to go back two or three decades. This was a problem for team "No Pressure!" since four team members were born in 1989 and the baby was born in 1990. So you could say the Team "No Pressure!" were the underdogs from the start but they were a pompous group of twenty-somethings. Unlike the last round, "No Pressure!" won the first round! Then, the second round was "Name a state with two words in its name"; team "Mission Possible" buzzed in first with four best answer, "Rhode Island", but "No Pressure!" answered with the best answer with "New York". We decided to play (we played everytime. Only losers "pass") and won all 100 points in the round! "No Pressure!" took a huge lead and looked like no one could stop them from getting 400 points. The bombastic team looked good until "Mission Possible" won the next two rounds... It was getting interesting, "No Pressure!" failed to steal points by not listening to their best "Feuder" (Me!). The once high-flying "No Pressure!" team that thought they had the game won was now in doubt. But somehow we were in high-spirits and picked up  it up and won the next two rounds; eventually "No Pressure!" won the 2013 Family Feud Championship! Oh Yes! Thank you "Mission Possible" for a good game and even more thanks to my teammates!

"No Pressure!"'s Mascot: