On Saturday, I attended a Science Creativity competition held by my company's Education Foundation. It's an annual competition with a cash prize/scholarship of 100,000 NTD to the winning team of four highschool students. The challenge was to create an automated structure with 4 stages, show two displays of Physics and two displays of Chemistry. So students, in the area provided, would create systems of moving parts, pullies, cascading dominos, ingredient mixing, burning things, etc using as much creativity as possible - subsequently judged on their efforts. But I was actually pretty disappointed with the results. Team after team had failing experiments, with links between each Physics/Chemistry stage that would break instead of falling through to continue the action to the next stage. I felt like these teams didn't think their experiments through, and didn't prepare and practice enough to be successful.

Nevertheless, it reminded me a lot of going to the Technolymics back in highschool. Those were fun times. Hopefully these kids learned a few things along the way too.