Year 12 students recently took part in the Weizmann Institute’s Annual Safecracking Competition. While we did not win, our two teams had a great time defending their safes and cracking others.
Harry M said:
“We had a great time designing, testing and building our safe combining Lenz’s law and moments into a physics puzzle box. The process culminated on a Sunday where we took our safes to Dulwich College for the competition. It was a very fun day where we tried to crack safes of different teams while also ‘defending’ our safe seeing the variety of approaches used by other teams to crack our safe and the interesting and diverse range of physics principles used to build their own safes.”
Ollie T said:
“Over the past five months my team and I have been building a physics puzzle box to enter the Weizman’s safe cracking competition which took place last week. While we didn’t win, it was a fun and challenging experience. We took several months to settle on physics concepts to explore and how to integrate them with a theme and puzzle; followed by many lunchtimes and evenings spent at school constructing the masterpiece. We grew close to the DT workshops and the many machines and tools we continuously used to build our safe. Although much of our safe fell apart through the weeks, and on the day, our final product still looked outstanding and worked just as intended.”
We created an under the sea themed puzzle box named ‘The Safe Kraken’, which featured the prize of buried treasure guarded by the tentacles of a sea monster. We included an electromagnet puzzle up a crashing wave as well as a coral conundrum of capacitors.
On the day we got to test other schools’ boxes as well as having ours attempted by them, not one group was able to crack our safe and we had the delight of solving several.
The challenge of doing this over the past few months has increased my physics knowledge, problem solving skills, and my talent with power drills, this was an experience I will not forget and will highly recommend to future students looking to take part.
Mr M Shetzer, Physics Teacher