Day 1: Getting to Israel and First Impressions

Well we all made it to Israel in one piece (the safe included).  I guess all those extra precautions we took while packing paid off.  We met the Toronto team at the El Al counter after an uneventful flight from Montreal.  I honestly think I was the only one flipping out about the safe (there were fragile stickers and "this way up" stickers covering the entire box).    

The flight to Israel was...long.  We all underwent somewhat of a culture shock.  The announcements on the plane were made in Hebrew, the entertainment was in Hebrew, the little plane snacks were in Hebrew.  It took a while to get used to not being able to understand anything, but once we got into The Weizmann Institute, everyone spoke English again.  

The Institute is absolutely enormous, like gigantic.  Before coming, I took a look at the map but I still didn't expect it to be so huge.  The weather is nice, compared to the snow we came from (the grass is green and there are flowers blooming all over the campus).  We took a tour of some of the more important buildings with some of the international students this morning.  There are kids from all over the world.  We met teams from London, Minsk, Rome, and a guy from Serbia today.  The Israeli teams don't arrive until tomorrow when the actual tournament begins.  

Hopefully by that time we will have gotten over our jet lag and have gotten a decent night's rest.  We're all so excited to be here, even though it hasn't quite set in yet.  

  

Montreal Regional Competition: Weizmann Science Physics Tournament

The competition in Montreal took place at St-George's on March 6th 2008.  The teams competing were St-George's, Herzliah, Hebrew Academy, Trafalgar, Bialik, and ourselves.  The cracking part of the competition came first.  The safes stayed in the respective team classrooms along with one member of the team, in case anything needed to be fixed and to reset the safe for the next team.  The rest of the team members rotated between safes along with an assigned timer and we were each given ten minutes to break into each safe.  We then filled in a sheet ranking every safe from one to five.  Following a short break, the official judging began.  Four judges tested our individual knowledge of the safe and the properties behind it.  We had to demonstrate how the safe worked and opened.  The final criteria for judging was the esthetics of the safe. Next we had dinner and then the public viewing began, after which the judges announced the winner: The Study!

Study Physics Team Travels to University of Vermont Physics Department

In order to get to where we are, the five of us have not only worked hard during and after school for the past 6 months, we were also fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to travel to Vermont. We caught a bus down to the University of Vermont in the early morning, and spent the day under the wing of a couple of UVM teachers. We arrived in Vermont with nothing but an idea and a sketch, and after the first day, we returned to Montreal with the outer shell of our box created, our glass tube fitted and made, and some of the other components finished! Between our first and second visit to the UVM, we had our box more or less completed. Dave Hammond and Mike Hamblin, the two that helped us throughout our stay, offered us a chance to visit the University a second time, this time, rather then using all the amazing equipment and machines that we didn't have access to in Montreal, we benefited from this day by learning all about the physics concepts our safe didn't cover. We wanted to not only have an uncrackable safe, we also wanted to have a good shot at understanding other team's safes. Dave set up a whole bunch of interesting experiments and demonstrations and this gained us a better understanding of what might come up on the day of the competition.