The first weekend of December was an eventful one indeed. There was the Dota 2 tournament and paper airplane competition which were both hosted by USMC. In addition to that, there was also the football tournament held at SMK Medini whereby two teams from USMC participated in.
Since I don’t play Dota and I suck in football (the ball tends to propagate towards anywhere but the place I’m aiming at), I only participated in the Paper Airplane Competition. This event may seem boring or childish to some but believe me, it was intense. Seriously, everyone was smiling and laughing ecstatically at first, but when it was their turn to throw their plane, their expressions suddenly changed into this:
Despite the competition being open to every university in Educity, the competition was dominated by the students from USMC. As a matter of fact, there was only 1 participant from another university. This wasn’t surprising to me, I mean, who in their right mind would want to go against engineers in an event like this?!
The competition was divided into two categories:
– Longest flight time
– Furthest distance
For the longest flight time category, everyone did the same thing – reconstruct the plane that broke the Guinness Book of World Records. Because of this, winning came down to pure luck, which I apparently didn’t have at the time.
For some reason, this wasn’t the case for the furthest distance category as everyone had different planes. At first, I had a brilliant idea – crush the paper into a ball and throw it with all my strength. I had even triple checked the list of rules beforehand to ensure that I wasn’t violating any of them. I was certain I was going to win (or at least come close to winning) as I was able to throw it to a distance of approximately 20 meters when I was testing it out, even with the flimsy, stick-thin arms of mine. However, I was only told the sad truth that doing so was a violation of the rules AFTER I crushed my paper into a ball……
So, I had to create another plane, USING THE SAME PAPER!!! The results were horrifying. The plane looked as if it’s been run over by a lawnmower and trampled on by a thousand gorillas. However, when it came to the test flight, the plane showed promising results, it flew quite well, the only catch is that it flew backward 90% of the time, meaning that there will be a 90% chance of me getting a negative result. At the time, I didn’t have enough time to change it. So, I had three options:
- Forfeit from that category
- Bet on that 10 % and throw it forward
- Throw it in the opposite direction
Despite the silliness of it, it is obvious which option had the greatest success rate. Plus, I had nothing to lose, so why the heck not. In the end, I managed to land a distance of approximately 1-2 meters, which surprisingly wasn’t the worst. As it turns out, there were actually a few contestants who faced the same predicament as me. I guess you could say that their “plane back-fli-ed”.
At the end of the day, the event was a blast thanks to USMC IET’s hard work. It was certainly an enjoyable experience for me and everyone else who attended.
All photos courtesy of Sean Ng and Lai Chung Kwan