Are you smarter than a 4th grader?

Today I recalled an elementary school contest/assignment, as I was considering how fast dry ice disappears out of our Styrofoam coolers at work.

Essentially there were no other instructions for the class contest other than the objective. The contest was to see who could build the best design to slow the melting of an ice cube. I am pretty sure the word build was in the assignment. The teacher had not told us how the designs would be judged.

If you are like me take some extra time and have some fun designing it in your head. I would like you to stop and take two minutes to think about how you would do it before you continue reading.

My 4th grade design was to take polystyrene foam (normal people would call it Styrofoam) and create an insulated box. Bind the box with glue to make the seals. Take that box and wrap it with insulating film and tape that up. Before the final preparations water was put in the container and then seal it. The whole thing went in the freezer and became an ice cube in the freezer.

The teacher took the designs out of the freezer that morning and gave us the results later in the day. The teacher said that the way the winners were judged was by the size of the ice remaining when she saw it later in the day. The second and third prizes went to two people that just used a store bought cooler. That irritated me a lot because the assignment specifically said to build something. Depending on how you looked at it either they cheated, were really lazy did nothing and grabbed the cooler at the last moment. The alternative way of looking at it was that they were brilliant and managed to get away without doing the assignment and got a really good grade and prizes for doing nothing!

So that brings me to the first place. Guess who came in first place? Everyone had started with whatever sized and shaped ice cube they put in the design. The teacher was so excited that my ice cube was almost the same size as when it started. I pondered this skeptically, thinking wow I am better than I thought. When I got given back my design realized that there was definitely a difference in perception. The cube inside my design was about the size of an ice cube coming out of a tray. The glue did not hold up to the melting process well and fell apart, letting the melt water leak out of the container. Since the teacher had not specified on the size of the ice cube I had broken no rules and felt no need to inform her of this. She never asked what size it started as. Mine just happened to be a bit bigger. I was definitely not willing to be beaten by the cheaters that put no effort into the project. What the teacher did not understand was that originally the ice cube would have been 3 times that size.

The moral of story is to be very precise with your specifications.