Math Club Wins Top Awards Among Blitz Booths at Spring Carnival
This year’s Spring Carnival brought to life Myths and Legends throughout history. The Carnegie Mellon Math Club combined both magic and historical legend as it transported Carnival-goers back to a time of castles, kings and mathematical sorcery with its award-winning booth, Merlin’s Quest.
The design was based around scenes from the lessons that Merlin taught the young King Arthur, which took first place among all “blitz” booths — booths that are contained in an 8’x18’ plot. The group also won the environmental award among blitz booths for their attention to energy efficiency, recycling and reusing of building materials.
Upon entering, visitors encountered Arthur’s first meeting with Merlin at his hut in the forest. From there, the surrounding walls laid out four “quests,” as
introduced by Merlin’s owl Archimedes, that Arthur must complete on his quest to become king. Visitors could help by solving a few mathematical riddles along the way. Tasks included determining relationships within a flock of geese as friends or strangers, taking on Zeno’s paradox and decrypting a secret message using a scytale. The journey ended with the ultimate kingly challenge — pulling a sword out of the stone, or in the Math Club’s case, pulling a sword out of a box to open the lid and collect a small prize.
“Some of our favorite visitors were those that came in and thoughtfully did our activities, sometimes for as long as an hour,” said Elliot Haney, mathematical sciences senior and Math Club booth chair. “We also enjoyed seeing people’s reactions to our booth. On the back wall, we had a fire extinguisher and a light switch. As a joke, we wrote above them ‘some gifts Merlin brought from the future.’ To our surprise, that was one of the most popular additions we made.