Chris Kitterman, left, and Philip Lyons watch as a Ping Pong ball launched from the catapult they designed sails just short of a bucket at the DODDS Europe Technology Fair at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, on Wednesday. Teams had to design and build a machine that would deliver Ping Pong balls into a bucket suspended between two platforms. (Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes)
RHEIN-MAIN AIR BASE, Germany — It’s not often that science junkies like Dionysios Watson and Ricky Carns step off a stage to a round of applause from their peers, shaking hands of fellow students like co-captains of the football team after a big game.
But that’s just what happened Wednesday afternoon during a structural engineering competition at the annual DODDS-Europe Technology Fair.
The seniors from Wiesbaden High School had just pulled off the impossible by creating a structure out of one-eighth-inch thick balsa wood that held — prepare to gasp — 229.8 pounds.
When the structure finally gave way to the metal weights stacked on top of it, the nearly 20 students and teachers watching broke out of their silence and into applause. The boys were one step away from giving out autographs to their adoring fans.
“You could have stood on it,” Watson enthusiastically told his teammate. “I told you.”
It’s moments like these that make the annual two-day competition worth the trip each year, Carns said.
Similar excitement rang out during the “junkyard wars” competition in which students used cardboard tubes, rubber bands, wooden dowels and other items to create structures that flung Ping-Pong balls into a bucket three feet away. The team with the most balls in the bucket after a minute won.
“We won,” Wiesbaden High School senior Chris Kitterman exclaimed after his team’s catapult led him to a first-round victory with just one ball in the bucket.
Kitterman’s team eventually lost out to an admittedly better design by a team from Ramstein High School. But winning wasn’t the point, he said.
“This class is a fun way to put our engineering to use,” Kitterman said.
For other competitions, students used computer programs to design a common area for Wiesbaden High School, build a bridge and animate the fair’s logo.
That’s a far cry from the first Department of Defense Dependents Schools competition 21 years ago, said coordinator Frank Pendzich. Pendzich, a teacher at Wiesbaden High School, remembers when students competed making cabinets and bird houses.
“We teach engineering now instead of shop,” he said.
For many of the 235 students from across Europe who competed this week, the technology fair provided a welcome retreat from the snickering that accompanies a normal school day, said Anita Long, a Lakenheath High School teacher.
“There’s this nerdy kind of outlook of kids who do these things,” said Long, who rode 12 hours by bus with 12 students to attend the competition. “It’s not cool to be smart. But in these kinds of things, it is cool.”
Chris Kitterman, left, and Philip Lyons watch as a Ping Pong ball launched from the catapult they designed sails just short of a bucket at the DODDS Europe Technology Fair at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, on Wednesday. Teams had to design and build a machine that would deliver Ping Pong balls into a bucket suspended between two platforms. (Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes)
From left, Shawn Hart, Chris Farmer, Keith Leach and Daniel Zheng construct a tower for a structural engineering project at the DODDS-Europe Technology Fair. (Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes)
Ricky Carns, left, and Dionysios Watson place weights on a tower they built for a structural engineering project at the DODDS-Europe Technology Fair. Made of only sticks and glue, the tower held 229.8 pounds of weight before breaking. (Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes)
