It's About Time 2009

• The rules for the Utah hosted event are slightly different than those for the national event. (Frankly, we think it's more fun this way.) For our version, competitors build a timing device onsite from materials that are given to them at the time of the event. This year the materials consisted of the following, from which a wide variety of devices were built by teams:
  • Cookie sheet
  • long (1 m) steel bar with holes
  • small bucket
  • 4 large washers
  • 1 CD
  • 1 mouse with USB cable (Apple)
  • 1 pulley with ringstand mount
  • 4 1” threaded screws
  • 1 PVC pipe, “bend quarter,” about 8 inches long with 90 deg bend at one end
  • 1 “hook” with threaded end
  • 1 spring (like used in furniture under cushions)
  • 4 “magnetix” magnets with 4 steel balls
• Specific Utah rules for It's About Time
• Event sheet/instructions

Balloon Race 2007

• Event sheet/instructions

Simple Machines 2007

• Event sheet/instructions

Fermi Questions 2004 & 2005

Philosophy:

A Fermi question (or Fermi problem) is a question that requires some kind of numerical answer that requires a great deal of estimation and thought, but can be figured very quickly with a only few pieces of limited information.  Often, the answer seems to be impossible to know at first glance, but upon some consideration it's possible to put pieces of known information together to come up with the correct answer.  For example, if you were asked to figure out the number of gallons of ice cream consumed in Utah in one year, you could first think about the population of the state (about 2 million), and then the amount of ice cream an average person might eat in a week (about a cup, maybe), and then the number of weeks in a year (about 52).    Doing some easy rounding, you could multiply the population by the number of weeks by the number of gallons: 10^6 people * 10^(-1) gallons (per cup) * 10^2 weeks per year = 10^7 gallons.  Even though each of the numbers used in this calculation was severely rounded to the nearest order of magnitude (multiple of ten), the answer comes out remarkably close to the actual amount.  (Ref: The Deseret News; Feb. 8, 2002).  In addition, if you make a mistake in any one of your estimations, they are often corrected in the end by the rounding and/or by the mistakes in other estimations.

My set of Fermi questions are varied in difficulty and the background knowledge required.  I ask 30 questions, and I expect that everyone should get some of them right, and no one should get all of them right.  The point is to see how many you can complete and get right in a limited amount of time.  With a little bit of practice, you'll probably get pretty good at thinking this way.

Here is what I used in the March 6, 2004 event for the Utah Science Olympiad:

	The "official" set of Fermi Questions
	And the answers (These are my answers.  For all of them, I either did the calculation myself a few different ways and/or looked up actual data from a variety of references.  Please let me know if you have questions about any of these.)

	Science Olympiad rules
	Science Olympiad guide
	A library of Fermi questions
	Hampton University's collection
	Physics Fermi problems from University of Maryland
	A bunch of facts that can be useful when inventing Fermi problems.

	demonstrate the skillful use of a balance;
	demonstrate an understanding of the concepts of density, weight, mass, and area; and
	demonstrate careful measurement and construction techniques.

Soap Bubbles	A Simple Machine
Density of Washers

Here are some other pictures of the events.   Maybe you are in one of the pictures!

 

The following links describe the three experiments within the physical science lab event for 2000:

	Cover sheet
	Experiment 1: Orbitz
	Experiment 2: The Density of Washers
	Experiment 3: A Simple (?) Machine!