A team of juniors and seniors from Atlanta’s Weber School recently won an unusual honor by designing an almost impregnable safe. Their creation, which requires a creative knowledge of physics, put them at the top of the U.S. participants at the Weizmann Institute’s International Safe-Cracking tournament, held in Israel in February.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, Weber teacher Spencer Roby is quick to explain.
“It’s called safe cracking, but it’s really about physics,” said Roby. “The idea is to build a box that takes solving different physics riddles to open a locking mechanism. Our box had two riddles, and if you understand physics, you can solve it.”
Team members Eric Lieberman, Levi Durham, Becky Arbiv, Justin Cobb and Ross Williams – the first from the school to enter the international competition – began working on a safe last fall and hit on the idea of using a Coca-Cola theme.
“The goal of our safe was to find the secret recipe to Coke inside the box,” said Roby. “Most of it is based on the construction and physics behind the safe. Ours had two parts: The first is a wooden box with a piece in the middle covered with clear Plexiglass that has three different circuits you have to solve – that’s the physics part. The second part has a silver box that opens when a motor is turned on.”
But the teams of safe-crackers students who tried to open the box at the competition had only their knowledge, a lemon, a can of Coke and a scissors to work with. Only one team managed to succeed. The difficulty of the safe’s construction, coupled with high marks from judges for construction and aesthetics, placed the Weber team at the top of the five U.S. participants among the more than 100 entrants from around the globe.
But the experience was not all about winning. “It was the process,” said Roby. The students learned so much about physics and building. It’s not as easy as you’d think: Even though the safe looks neat, it has to work. It’s a great way for students to learn physics, but there was a lot of independent learning, too.”
Junior Lieberman said the project involved significant research.
“We had to learn everything on our own, especially when what worked on paper didn’t work the same way in real life,” he said. “I learned how to do some design and building.”
Lieberman signed up for the project, thinking the idea of “safe cracking” would be fun. “Honestly, it sounded a lot easier on paper. It took us a while to come up with an idea and get into the groove. But once we started building the box, we got more committed and invested. And we’re really happy how it turned out, especially since this was our first year.”
Roby is already planning a project for next year’s competition. “We will definitely do it again,” he said. “We’re looking at ideas and thinking about who should be on the team.”
And he doesn’t expect it will be too tough to recruit new members. “I think that ‘safe cracking’ part really gets their attention.”
Information about The Weber School: weberschool.org.
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