In fourth grade we had a paper airplane contest, but they had a restriction on the design: a circle about the size of a quarter was on the page, and no fold or crease could go through the circle.
The circle was located a few inches above the exact center of the paper.
Anyway I made a "dart", and just offset the angle a little to avoid the circle. It was good, and most of the competition was incredibly bad. And a few maybe had a bad launch. One throw only.
One clever design was submitted by a duo composed of my two worst nine year old enemies: Derek and Derek's sidekick. It was basically a UFO (saucer) made by carefully crumpling the edge until it was a nice size to throw. They threw it sidearm with one finger hooked around the rim.
It really sailed, maybe went twice as far as the second best plane: my plane.
But their plane was disqualified on the grounds that it wasn't a plane. So, I was deemed winner.
For the announcements the next morning, my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version (something like Jesse announced as Jessica) and it definitely didn't feel like a win anymore.
I was at a math camp where one of the activities was that each team had to design a paper plane and get it to a castle on top of a hill by throwing it the fewest times possible (like in golf). Several teams converged on a design of a crumbled ball of paper as that was what offered the best combination of accuracy and distance.
Since there was no rule against it, we've allowed it. Some of the teams who played with conventional airplanes got furious. (These were all adult people!) Although innitially looking fairly innocent, I believe it ended up as the second most controversial activity we've held.
Haha. It wasn't my game and it was called "The Stick".
Played outdoor, between two teams who face each other on the opposite sides of a small playing field. In the middle there is a stick stuck into the ground.
The players are assigned various numbers. In each round a moderator announces a predicate such as "even numbers" or "factors of three primes" or "sum of digits is a power of two" etc.
The players who satisfy the predicate are allowed onto the field and their goal is to get the stick and bring it to their side. If a player mistakenly steps into the field they are out of the game. Grabbing and pulling other players while battling for the stick is fine.
The last time this was played it rained a bit and the terrain was muddy and slippery and also the game was probably needlessly violent. Too many people didn't enjoy it and we've decided to retire it.
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While I'm at it, the third most controversial game was a game where teams had to complete various tasks in and around the village after the sunset, find some objects, etc. We always have at least one such game and it is usually one of a kind, played just that one time.
This time there was a special twist. Unknown to the rest of the players, each team had a traitor whose goal was to hinder the progress of their team as much as possible. The traitor whose team finished in the last place was the actual winner of the game.
The activity was not scored, but the players were led to believe it is going to be scored.
When we played it some teams had conflicts and it sowed a lot of distrust and paranoia that spilled into the next day's games as well. Also the players who gave the game a lot of effort were angry that it is not scored in the end. It was the opposite of a team building activity so we never explored it further.
Although I have to say, I'm still intrigued by the concept and would like to try it in some other form one day again.
There are also some D&D campaigns that work in the same way (and unlike in the board games the heroes don't know that there might be traitors among them).
There’s a major difference between expected betrayal being part of the rules of a game, and gaslighting groups of children into competing under false pretenses. Does playing by the rules of BSG or Saboteur guarantee a loss for the team that by the rules should be winning?
The analogy would be appropriate if BSG was a competitive space fleet management game and some players decide in advance to make it a meta-game to join and sabotage each fleet without telling anyone of their intentions, leaving everyone else playing the ”fake” game while they at the end reveal the ”real” game and that whoever lost the real game actually won and vice versa.
These are camps for adults and the activity was not scored. Playing by the rules didn't guarantee a loss — there were no winners or loosers among the non-traitors.
I think the major issue that sets the game apart from the mentioned board games is that players don't know there might be traitors. OTOH it's impossible to have the board game that way, since it would only work the first time it is played. However, the D&D campaigns are the same as our game in this regard.
Anyway, the game wasn't all bad, some teams told us that they had a great time and found it an interesting and uncommon experience. But since too many people struggled with it we've decided to not run it again.
I believe it was the great origami grandmaster Akira Yoshizawa who said, "Wet a piece of paper, crumple it into a ball, let it dry, and throw it hard. It will go quite far. A paper airplane must go farther, otherwise it might as well not be a paper airplane."
I'm aware of an even more efficient "hack" of the rules as different versions of this type of story are a mainstay of certain types of business courses where they want to try and teach a lesson of working together, delegation, cooperation, task specialization, etc.
The most efficient way to move a stack of paper to a goal isn't to take each piece and do something to it (crumple/fold) but to just leave it together and heave the entire ream of paper.
Note: this also frustrates the folks putting on the activity.
Lean consultant: the more efficient way is to move the goal to the stack of paper. Especially if the goal is just a defined point in space you can redefine it with no effort at all.
Reading that story, I feel bad for Derek. They thought outside the box, and came up with an objectively superior solution -- only to have it rejected for no reason other than the fact that they thought outside the box.
On the surface, this sounds like a fabulous exercise: it requires some creative engineering thinking. But apparently, the way they addressed the winners left both of the top two teams feeling unsatisfied. Great exercise; poor execution.
The inventor, when it was a new things years ago, submitted it to a Paper Airplane contest. The contests disqualified him because it was not an "Airplane".
He argued A) It s made of paper (Cardboard from a Pizza Box), B) it flew (for very long distances), therefore it is a Paper Airplane. QED
From experience I can tell you that A) They are attracted to trees, B) They swim like bricks (lost my first one in the first half hour to the local creek), C) They are very sensitive to thermal gradients. You can watch it ride up and over the finger tips of whomever you are playing with so it is just out of their reach. D) You need football size field, at a minimum, to paly with these.
>my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version
that really sounds like the kind of thing a person might get stuck with through out their days in school. did this stick around for awhile, or was it mercifully a short lived thing?
I guess you had better friends that I did. I had a name "given" me that stuck all through school, and would probably still get mentioned by some of the asshats from back then.
The circle was located a few inches above the exact center of the paper.
Anyway I made a "dart", and just offset the angle a little to avoid the circle. It was good, and most of the competition was incredibly bad. And a few maybe had a bad launch. One throw only.
One clever design was submitted by a duo composed of my two worst nine year old enemies: Derek and Derek's sidekick. It was basically a UFO (saucer) made by carefully crumpling the edge until it was a nice size to throw. They threw it sidearm with one finger hooked around the rim.
It really sailed, maybe went twice as far as the second best plane: my plane.
But their plane was disqualified on the grounds that it wasn't a plane. So, I was deemed winner.
For the announcements the next morning, my name was announced as the wrong-gendered version (something like Jesse announced as Jessica) and it definitely didn't feel like a win anymore.
I still like paper airplanes, though.