Thursday, February 15, 2007 Older Editions

Not eggs-ackley a traditional contest

By April Guilmet

Think you can build a catapult that will fling an egg 60 feet - and with accuracy? If so, your catapult could be worth $60,000 in scholarship to Merrimack College.

Although no local students have signed up for the challenge yet, Gary Spring is hoping to draw their interest to it, and to Merrimack College's civil engineering program.

As chairman of civil engineering for the college, Spring said he opted for an egg catapault scholarship contest because he wanted to "do something different."

Today, Thursday, Feb. 15, is the deadline for students to register for the contest, which requires high school students to build a catapault that will throw an egg into a frying pan that's up to 60 feet away.

On Tuesday, Andover High science program adviser Donna Pappalardo said she was unaware of any students entering the contest. She wasn't sure, however, if any teachers knew about the contest or had students entering.

The competition will be held on March 24, during the college's Thinkfest event, a festival featuring a variety of hands-on engineering, science and technology-related events geared towards middle and high school students. The student who builds the winning catapault will win a four-year, $15,000 per year scholarship to Merrimack College's civil engineering program. The second place winner will take home a four-year, $5,000 per year scholarship. Third place prize is a $1,000 gift certificate to the school's Barnes and Noble book store.

"We have no local entries at this point," Spring said Monday morning, adding that so far only a handful have registered for the contest, some from as far away as Cape Cod. "But hopefully we'll get many more. High school kids sometimes tend to procrastinate."

Spring had originally intended for students to design a spaghetti bridge, but then realized that many other competitions focus on bridge-building.

"Everybody does bridge competitions," he said. "But with a catapault, same as a bridge, we can predict the results to some degree using physics and math."

Contest winners will be announced on March 24, the day of the competition, Spring said.