Teams from French Camp, Southaven, Starkville win
firsts
OXFORD, Miss. – While balls were being thrown Tuesday (April 21) at the University of Mississippi’s Vaught Hemingway Stadium, there were no Ole Miss football players to be seen – only brainy middle and high school students from around the state.
The students were visiting campus for the third-annual Gravity-Driven Catapult (Trebuchet) Hurling Competition. Trebuchets originated as medieval engines of war that used a counterweight to propel projectiles at enemy targets, such as castle walls.
In the UM competition, students used one-armed, metal, wood-and-rope catapults, designed by each team, to hurl fluorescent tennis balls across the field. Ole Miss engineering students recorded the distance and height of each toss, and engineers from FedEx Corp. strolled the field talking with the students and judging their contraptions.
Registering for the event were 17 teams representing 10 schools: Amory High School, Charleston High School, French Camp Academy, Leflore County School, Monroe County Vocational Center, Northwest Rankin High School, Oxford High School, Saltillo High School, Southaven Middle School and Starkville High School.
First-, second- and third-place awards were presented in the categories of accuracy, design, distance and height.
Starkville High School took home three trophies, including two for first in both height and distance. French Camp Academy and Southaven Middle School were first-place winners in design and accuracy, respectively.
Second-place winners were Amory High School in the height category, Charleston High School in accuracy and Saltillo High School in design and distance. Placing third were Monroe County Vocational Center in accuracy and French Camp Academy in distance. Leflore County School and Starkville High School tied for third in the design category. Charleston High School and Northwest Rankin High School were both third-place winners in height.
“There were some very well-designed trebuchets, and we saw some record performances for the competition,” said Joey Parkerson, a senior chemical engineering, computer and information science and mathematics major from French Camp, who volunteered to help with the competition.
Before the day’s final competitive event, participants faced off in preliminaries and visited the Ole Miss science, engineering, and mathematics departments for tours and lab demonstrations.
“The catapult competitions in the past were such great successes that we moved outside this year to provide opportunities for students to design and construct even larger catapults,” said Maxine Woolsey, educational outreach specialist in the School of Engineering and coordinator of the event. The trebuchets could be up to seven feet tall in the rest position and could weight up to 90 pounds.
“Much of the success of the events has been the interaction between the high school students and the engineering students,” Woolsey said. The engineering students facilitated the competition, she added.
In medieval times, trebuchets were more accurate than other catapults, which used tension or torsion to fire projectiles. In modern times, trebuchets have become popular devices for hurling pumpkins, frozen turkeys or even junk cars in light-spirited competitions.
Sponsors for the competition included the UM School of Engineering and the Mississippi Junior Academy of Sciences.
For more information about the School of Engineering, visit http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/engineering?school/ .