Caledonia Senior Secondary School’s physics club brought home a bronze metal from the Physics Olympics.
Four students and two teachers flew to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for the event March 12, and won bronze in one of six competitions and eighth place overall.
The students, David Bell-Brown, Mitchell Grypstra, Nolan Weibe and Selena Kunar competed for Cal against 57 teams from other schools.
“Cal does traditionally very well,” said Kelly Axelson, one of the team’s teacher supervisors.
“We want to keep this going to prove that small towns are strong.”
She estimated that in order to place eighth in the competition overall, the team must have scored in the top 10 for each event.
The events included a game of gravity golf, where students were challenged to build a ceiling-suspended device to drive a golf ball into a sandpit.
This event brought Cal the bronze. Other events included drag racing mini-cars powered by the energy of a mousetrap, an estimation challenge, hitting a target with a light refracted laser beam, a quiz and a challenge to determine the length of metal pipes by measuring their vibration.