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Paradox21 wrote:

chalker7 wrote: We absolutely did think about this. In fact, we were expecting more people to take advantage of the balloon points. We thought that it was a subtle extra engineering challenge for teams who could easily complete the other tasks. Now, instead of just doing the tasks they would also attempt to minimize their volume so they could construct as large of a balloon as possible. However....we thought the water rocket/balloon thing wouldn't work, but as always, you students are more creative/ingenius than us. Serious kudos to any team that could figure out how to lift huge amounts of mass (either through water tanks or other techniques).

I definitely understand that you wanted people to try to minimize the volume of their other tasks, but it appears that the balloon was so important that teams could cut out the majority of their transfers. The balloon became more important than the transfers. I would have thought that you would value the points in such a way (that is, make the sign worth fewer points per gram, perhaps 1 point per gram), so that the top scoring device would still have to fit all of the transfers in, but cram them in the smallest possible space. The winning team would be the team that could perform all the transfers perfectly, in the smallest space. Rather than making the largest balloon and omitting the transfers entirely.

We were predicting the top teams wouldn't exceed 150 grams (as described by my brother above). A team performing all the tasks with a perfect sand timer and a normal balloon would still beat a team that only used a balloon lifting that weight. That teams found momentum/water solutions was, admittedly, beyond our foresight. That being said, I'm honestly pretty excited when I find out that a team has a creative solution like that (although others certainly disagree).

Congratulations to Northridge for pulling off the win. I was part of the second place team from Arizona: Catalina Foothills. We also used the water tank idea. Our balloon release mechanism was completed the night before in the shower as our previously devised release mechanism did not work. We therefore did not have time to find the maximum our balloon could lift and we could have lifted at least 50g more. But as murphy's law says, the mechanism did not work the morning of the competition and it took us a whole hour to set up the release mechanism. We therefore did not get the thirty minute setup time points and as our ice all melted we did not get points for the cooling task. We had all of the other tasks work however. We were able to lift ~385g. This is proof of the necessity getting things done early as our failure to do this probably cost us the championship.