catapult contest

Apr 28, 2011

This semester in Math Alive! we studied Archimedes’ life, inventions, and discoveries. We built Archimedean screws, pulleys, levers of all types, discovered pi by circumscribing a circle, figured out how many popcorn kernels it would take to fill our classroom, learned about the library in Alexandria, constellations, food and customs of his time period, exponents and super-duper large numbers, built mobiles for real and figured out pretend mobiles with numbers, learned about square, triangular, and rectangular numbers, learned about different types of calendars and invented our own calendars, and fell in love with all things mathematical.

Our closing event was a catapult contest. Each child was challenged to build a catapult that could fire a tennis ball and then to bring it to the field outside our building for a shoot-off. I was amazed at the wide variety of styles, sizes, and abilities of the different contraptions. We ended up giving prizes for things like farthest shooting, highest, most accurate, stretchiest, most original design, quickest on the battlefield, a true blue trebuchet, perfectly precise, superbly symmetrical, snappiest trigger, and most horizontal firing position.

Here are some pictures of our fun:

Love the pink and purple!

Such fun! I think we should have one of these every year…and another version for just the dads to compete in!