Scrapheap Showdown Challenge is Coming! Get your Team Together NOW!

Scrapheap Showdown is Coming ... time to get your teams together.
The Somerville Math Fund's annual high school engineering challenge is coming on Sunday October 30th.
Teams of three will arrive to discover what will be their challenge to build this year.  If you're interested in seeing some of the previous years' projects, click here.

To compete you must be a high school student living in Somerville MA.  Go to this link to get all of the details.  Start organizing your team NOW, the registration is due on October 14.

In the past, the teams not only came up with creative names for their teams, but they also came up with interesting creative solutions to the annual challenges.  We always have great prizes.

Go forth and form your teams!

Good Luck!

Scrapheap Showdown is Coming! Time to get your teams together

Each October the Somerville Mathematics Fund sponsors a high school engineering challenge for students from Somerville.

High School students, who live in Somerville, MA, form teams of three competitors ahead of time.  Then on the day of the competition they arrive at Gantcher Gym at Tufts U and discover what this year's challenge will be.  At the end of the afternoon, their machines compete against each other for prizes.  To compete, each team needs to raise $75, and there is an additional prize for the best student fundraiser.

Here are pictures and links from last year's challenge.

Here is the link to download the entry form which is due on 17 October.

If you have questions, email mathfund@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing all the wonderfully creative students tackle this years challenge.

The link to this page is: http://somervillemathematics.blogspot.com/2014/09/scrapheap-showdown-is-coming-time-to.html
©2014 Erica Dakin Voolich

Jammin' in the Junkyard -- the 7th annual Scrapheap Showdown

The 7th annual Scrapheap Showdown was a BIG success.  You can read about it here.

The students rose to the challenge.  They didn't know until they arrived that they were going to build musical instruments.  They did a wonderful job.  Their instruments needed to play a diatonic scale and a simple tune in the key of C from a given list of melodies.  They earned more points buy building different kinds of instruments (string, percussion, wind) and by automation the playing of the melody.

Mother Nature cooperated and didn't dump large amounts of snow in Somerville and Medford -- Thank  you!
Tufts University was a wonderful host -- Thank you!
The design team who spent months designing and testing the challenge, and then collected and hauled the junk to Tufts were fabulous -- Thank you!
Our sponsors and donors who made the event and prizes possible were great -- Thank you!

If you'd like to see the pictures from  each of the teams, check out the links below:
Sticks of Doom

Milton's Squad 

Score: & e 0

Thrice Flavored Pi

KPS Hz 07

Go F.A.R.

Yong Kang You's

All is Well

The Llama Lords of Science

SWAG

Panda

General pictures from the event

Scrapheap Showdown, Marble Mazes meet Rube Goldberg!

Erica Dakin Voolich

On Sunday, October 25, twelve teams of Somerville Students gathered in “The Cage” at Cousens Gym at Tufts to participate in this year’s annual Scrapheap Showdown sponsored by The Somerville Mathematics Fund. This year’s problem involved building a marble maze to get from one corner of a banquet table to the opposite corner of a 2nd table two feet away.

Instead of just building a ramp from table corner to table corner, students had loop-the loops, spirals, cup elevators, triggers... all sorts of interesting Rube-Goldber-like obstacles.

As a member of the Somerville Mathematics Fund board, I was involved in the designing, testing and adjusting of the problem. We got to actually build our own solution, as we do each year, to know that it is possible and to figure out the scoring system. When the kids started working on the problem, their solutions were totally different, unique, creative and exciting.

Take a minute to look at the pictures of each of the teams hard at work on their projects and read all about the A-Mazing event in the Somerville Journal. Prior to the event, the Tufts online newsletter wrote about the upcoming event.

This year’s teams were:

Rubber Duckies

• Paulo Filipe Dourado

• Nelson Moreira

• Matthew Bedell

AMS Alliance

• Matthew Correia

• Sergio Resendes

• Adam Hughes

Freaks in Control

• Sabrina Ozit

• Lola Yu

The Coopers

• Michael Shamshak

• David Cooper

• Kayla Landry

You have to Spend Money to Make Money

• Nat Dempkowski

• Yongkang Yu

• Nathan Long

The Bird is the Word

• Danny Huang

• Nicholas Cruz

•Michael Conte

Bp(as)^2

• Bipul Pyakuryal

• Aakash Sharma

• Avtar Singh

The Devastators

• Mohammad Sheikh

• Timur Addul Talil

• Anandpreet Singh

De Villens

• Deepika Bhargo

• Aaron Nevin

• Tara Costiner

P.M. Norm

• Norman Li

• Pristine Mei

• Michele Mei

The Stern Halloran Man

•Christopher Halloran

• Jacky Man

• Jesse Stern

Asian Avengers V2

• David Huang

• Raymond Li

• Joshua Ren