Physics War 2008

The physics war is so much a part of the culture here and my class that I will never be able to stop doing this project. It is for this project that students sign up for my class.

The basic idea is that groups of 4 students get a length of PVC piping, a 2x4, and some surgical tubing (plus a few other nuts and bolts) which is built into basically a giant slingshot with a barrel. It's ... kind of awesome. :) hahaha. The students do a lab where we measure the angle and the corresponding range and explain their results based on the range equation.

This all culminates with a class vs. class physics war where each class has tin cans and they try to knock over other class' cans with tennis balls launched out of their slingshots. The four classes were in four corners of a field with the cans out in front of them. This is then followed with a panel discussion on war. As recommended by my mentor teacher, Tom Tailer, I invited an army recruiter, a returned soldier, a war veteran, and a pacifist and the students could ask them questions.

Well, to be honest, the panel discussion the last couple years has been remarkably lame, only barely physics related, and not nearly as controvertial as I had hoped. So this year I'm shifting. I'm going to make the war part more like Tom's and the post-war debrief less like Tom's.

Tom gives the groups an accuracy test and whoever gets the longest accurately-tested range gets the first choice of country. Yes. Tom sets up the soccer field like a map of the world and the countries available for choosing are known or suspected nuclear powers. Countries can invade each other and take each other's resources, which provides a motivation for who to aim at.

Now, he buys his students like pizza and rice and other "culturally typical" foods, but I wasn't quite ready to buy like eight pizzas for my students. :P So instead I've come up with my own unit of physics war capital: m&m's.

Yes, every country will receive an amount of m&m's proportional to that country's GDP. In order to invade another country (thus taking their m&m's) the aggressing country must knock over that country's can a number of times proportional to that country's millitary strength, measured in dollars spent on millitary.

If they one country invades another they get to take that country's m&m supply.

Meanwhile, I'm morphing the panel discussion into a student debate. We might debate in our own classes questions like "When is war justified?", "What is proper procedure for introducing weapon based on new technology?" (Tazers, EMP bombs, nukes, etc.), "Is it ok to perform medical testing of any kind on prisoners of war?" (The students came up with that last one).

So there we are. I'm pretty excited about it. It should all be going down either Halloween or the Thursday after Halloween. Ohhhh my it will be cold! :/