Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

We’ve been back for awhile now but, my oh my, have we been busy. The long and short of it — Wichita was fun, but not as much fun as University of Illinois. Nor as much fun as Indiana University last year. The town does have an exceptional zoo. Top-Notch for sure.

But let me share the results—-
Storm the Castle; given a 2.2KG counterweight and a 24gm squash ball SK set the target at 28M. He was quite concerned about the low ceiling and without that concern he would have set the target out at 32M. If he had set it there he would have hit the ceiling; but with a proper room setting, say like the room Storm the Castle was in at IU where the ceiling was not an issue, SK would have walked away with First Place. Instead he missed the box by a few inches and a few competitors later we watched as the box was set at 28M and the ball landed in the box. Back at home, the trebuchet threw the squash ball 32M. Sad. He had a great machine with a carbon fiber arm he developed himself, but wasn’t able to truly show it off.

Mission Possible—a Rube Goldberg device where the object is to have a very light weight can lift a heavy weight can. They set up their device and hit the operating time the judges gave them. They called the judges over, described how each simple machine operated, and then started the device. Suddenly the operation stopped and SK had to touch a wedge to get things going again. 19 point penalty which placed them into 14th position. This wedge never, even failed in the thousands of runs over the last 4 months. Why it failed that day, why it failed on that run is totally baffling. Helping SK deal with such disappointment was tough. We heard him say that he hated himself…. and quite a few other unpleasant things about himself….parenting that day was not fun at all.

Rocks & Minerals — they finished 17th which is quite respectable for a National Competition your first time through.

Heredity—SK finished 29th, which was OK too. He was disappointed because he said he really knew everything on the test but just ran out of time. He felt that if his partner, who only came on the event the previous week so he isn’t finding fault with her ability, had been able to answer questions and thus work on half the exam as he worked on the other half, they would have done quite well.

MilitaryKid was in two events too.

SumoBots—-finished 8th place! Way to go!
Geo-Cache—-the two brothers did this and for not preparing at all they did quite well with a 21st finish.

Both boys have already started planning which events they want to go for for next year, which pleases me. The results might not have been as stellar as they wanted but the experience is still beneficial.