Teams relive the experience of using catapults on LUMS PsiFi Day 3

The third day of LUMS Psifi carried a lot of expectations on its shoulders after the first and second day overjoyed the delegates. In our coverage of the first day, we revealed the artists who would be coming to the concert, i.e. Falak and Asrar. Well, that news had everybody hyped up to an unbelievable extent today!

The academic events of the day consisted of the second round of Seige. The first round of Siege took place on the second day of Psifi, wherein the participants built life-sized catapults and tested them out on their own. On the third day, they were judged on their models. Just to recap, each catapult was built using bamboo sticks, tape, rope while a tennis ball was used as the throwing object. Each team’s model was put through a test of range, accuracy, and speed. In the range test, one of the teams managed to get in excess of 50 meters in each of the three attempts allowed. In the accuracy test, teams were supposed to correctly aim the tennis ball at a target given to them. Unfortunately, only two teams managed to hit the target while the rest were unsuccessful. Last, in the speed test, teams had one minute to launch as many balls as possible. One of the teams exhibited extreme levels of coordination, managing roughly 30 balls within a minute, which equates to a ball launched every 2 seconds!

The second round of Diagnostic Dilemma simulated a mental asylum. The venue had a huge screen displaying an actual mental asylum, which really amplified its authenticity. Similar to round 1 of the event, round 2 also had members of the host team impersonating mental patients. A patient number had been assigned to each “patient”, while a patient card was given to each team when they entered the venue. The teams were supposed to talk to each of the patients and find out their name and their family background etc. One of the biggest aims of the teams was to find out the disease affecting the patient. Each team had a time limit of 5 minutes to find the required information, which was ultimately going to be used in generating a patient report by the end of the day. Each team was required to present this report to the event heads before the start of the third round the next day.

The third round of Tour de Mind was very interesting. The teams were shown a series of images pertaining to various categories such as world leaders, monuments, and company logos. There were three levels of difficulty, namely easy, middle and hard. Images shown in the easy level carried a 7 second time limit, during which the teams had to write down the name of the world leader, monument or company whose logo was shown. Likewise, the middle and hard levels carried a 10 and 15-second limit respectively. The world leader category consisted of images of the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau and the Wartime Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill etc. The monument category showed images of famous monuments like the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome. The logo category showed the emblems of firms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Walmart etc.

The second round of RGM, short for Rube Goldberg Machine required teams to make a makeshift model of the machine. Teams were given a set of tools like cardboard, polystyrene sheets, and scissors etc. Teams were frantically engaged amongst themselves, constantly trying to improve their progress on the models. Each model was supposed to be engineered in a way that there is a domino effect through the strike of a small ball or any other object. Ultimately, the main objective was to stimulate a domino effect which ends up in a balloon (which was to be placed at the end of the model’s tip) getting popped! A few of the teams’ models left the judges in awe, who openly admitted that they did not expect the teams to produce models of this caliber.

With the academic events dealt with for the day, delegates, host team members, and LUMinites headed over to the free parking area for the concert. The first artist for the night was Falak Shabbir, who took on the stage around 8:30 PM. The entire crowd inside the venue was electrified while there was a really long queue outside the venue, full of people waiting eagerly to enter the venue so that they could get a piece of the action. Falak’s team played some trance-like remixes of his music along with some other iconic songs. Falak repeatedly kept on telling the audience that the party has just started in a bid to keep their spirits alive, and his strategy worked perfectly considering the crowd didn’t stop jumping in joy before a full hour passed. When Falak moved out, Asrar came in to amaze the venue with his modern-day Sufiism. As a whole, both of them had the 500+ crowd fully thrilled throughout the duration of the concert.

This is all for now, check back tomorrow for our coverage of the last day!

About Psifi IX: It is the flagship event of the LUMS’ Society for Promotion and Development of Engineering and Sciences and has rustled up over 1000 delegates from around the country. Psifi is based on 16 individual academic events, which started on the first day and will go on until the 16th of January, which is the last day of the series of events.