Wednesday 12 June saw the annual Physics Olympics Competitions at St Peter’s School in York.
This event involves a team of four Year 8 students competing against 26 other teams in a number of fun, physics-based challenges which included considering how to best optimise a catapult before firing a number of sponge balls from it to get the highest score, and making a paper helicopter with the longest flight time. It also included an always-challenging Fermi quiz (example questions below!)
Scarborough College’s team consisted of Aryana Javaherian, Niamh Mulryne, Mishka Patel and Liv Smallwood. They enjoyed themselves and worked well in all challenges, narrowly missing out on podium positions in one, but winning a bonus prize for (almost) estimating the number of sweets in a water bottle.
Well done and thank you to the team!
The Fermi Quiz involves making an estimation to the nearest power of 10.
For example, if asked how many times a human heart beats in an average lifetime, you might consider 70 beats per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 24 hours per day x 365 days per year x 80 years in an average lifetime. This would give a value of about 3 billion or 3 x109 beats per lifetime. The nearest power of 10 is 9, so 9 would be the answer to the question. Using this idea, have a go at the following questions – giving your answers to the nearest power of 10?
1. How many seconds have elapsed since (allegedly) the apple fell on Newton’s head?
2. If you were to print 1 terabyte (Tb) of plain text (i.e. 1000 000 000 000 characters) in this font size on both sides of A4 paper, how thick would the stack be?
Correct answers will be revealed in the end of term Owl newsletter.
