St. George's students shine in physics competition

While they did not take first place, their 'safe' project was one of only seven entries that could not be cracked.

Coached by teacher Tom Daly, students Anthony Brohan, Anthony Tresierra-Jansen, Vivian Mau, Jared Berger and Natasha Dudek began preparing for the competition when school began last fall. They were given the challenge to design and construct a safe using only the principals of physics.

Competing teams in Canada, the United States, Israel, Russia and Moldova were each given a 16 x 12 x 10-inch wooden box with a transparent Plexiglas door that closed with an electromechanical locking device. Each of the five team members applied what they had learned in physics classes and their own ingenuity to make the safe impenetrable.

The project took the St. George's team just two weeks to assemble after creating a design that incorporated the principles of magnetism, induced magnetic fields, circuitry, inertia, simple harmonic motion, leverage, and even ballistics, in making their safe.

Not wanting to give an edge to their competition that might reveal the precise protocol to be used to open the box, the students would only say before the competition that the safe’s mechanism was powered by batteries and inside the box was a large electromagnet and a small hanging magnet.

Each team provided their opponents with a set of rules and a clue to help them crack the safe within the 10-minute time allotment. They also provided a detailed written description of their project to the judges.

Locally they competed with Bialik High School and Herzliah High School, Snowdon campus, in the Quebec regional round held on March 6 St. George's School. Neither team was able to break into the St. George's safe.

In Israel, the teams would be judged by the number of opposing teams who could unlock their safes and the overall quality of their projects. In the local competition, however, only one team was able to break into an opponent’s safe within the time limit so the panel of four judges, made up of McGill University professors and a Lower Canada College teacher, made the decision based on their evaluations of each project.

After deliberating for two hours, studying the safes and questioning the students they concluded that while all three entries were exceptional the project from St. George's was the best.

In late March, the St. George's team headed for Israel, accompanied by the Ontario winners from Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy, where they competed in the international Shalheveth Freier Physics Tournament at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences.

Of the over 100 teams registered for the competition, only 46 made it to the competition stage. During the competition, 324 attempts were made to break into the safes but only 65 were successful. The St. George's team won an award for being the most successful in breaking into the other safes in the shortest amount of time, and another for being one of seven teams whose safes were not broken into. They placed between 16 and 26 of the 49 entries.