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Hudson High Medieval Festival More Than Just A Spring Fling

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By KLINT LOWRY | The Suncoast News

Published: March 18, 2009

Face-painting, giant inflatable slides, a rock climbing wall and, what's this? A row of ancient weapons of mass destruction lined up on the Hudson High School football field?

The school held its fourth annual medieval festival Friday, and as students poured onto the field it looked like they were leaving their studies behind for two hours of fun and fantasy.

Not entirely, history teacher Eric Johnson explained. Modern students can learn a lot frolicking in the Middle Ages.

"We do physics, reading, math and science and the history classes," Johnson said. "We try to get the whole school involved."

In addition, students could run an inflatable obstacle course, "joust" with padded pugil sticks or scale the heights of a portable rock-climbing wall.

"They're all about strength and speed; the kids love it," Johnson said. "It's probably the best P.E. they get all week."

Many students read books from the medieval period. For the festival, they dressed in period costume and regaled their fellow students with what they learned about the period and its literature.

It's also become a part of the festival to invite kids from Northwest Elementary School to come play. To whet the imaginations of the grade-schoolers, the high school students visit the adjacent elementary school and tell them about the time period.

"That's cool, because you always learn more teaching," Johnson said.

The star attraction of the fair is the school trebuchet competition.

A technological descendant of the catapult, a trebuchet is a siege weapon that was most popular in 13th century Western Europe. Instead of simply using tension like a catapult does, a trebuchet has a swinging arm that is put into motion by a combination of balance, tension and counterweight.

Every year at Hudson, teams of physics students design and build trebuchets. At the festival, they line up their weapons on the field of honor - at about the 40-yard line - to see whose machine works best. They fire twice for distance and twice for accuracy, aiming to bring down a miniature "castle" in the end zone.

As students approached the trebuchets, voices could be heard asking, "Which one is Melvin's?"

Senior Melvin Velez has earned a reputation as the school's resident trebuchet expert. As he and his teammates did some last minute tweaking on their machine, he explained its design, and it became clear firepower depends on brainpower.

"You want to use the lightest materials with the best engineering you can so that it's the lightest and strongest it can be," Velez said. "The thing is you want the least amount of weight to do the most work."

With his team's trebuchet, the swinging arm was built along the same concept as a wooden bow, with several layers of wood connected so it will bend but not snap when lateral force is applied. The further out toward the end of the arm, the fewer layers of wood, causing a whip effect that flings the payload further.

Despite its size, the arm of the trebuchet is balanced so it can be moved with one finger. And as Velez also showed, the framework was designed largely as a lot of triangles, creating sturdiness and stability without bulk.

"It's just simple engineering," he said, "three points create a perfect plane in a space."

Of course, the end result of all that careful planning is the "Oohs" and Aahs" when the crowd sees a soccer ball or watermelon flung more than 100 feet through the air.

Before the competition, Johnson said there's a good chance this year's winning team will get to demonstrate their trebuchet at the Bay Area Renaissance Festival, in Tampa. He also hopes he can convince other Pasco high school physics departments to join in the trebuchet competition.

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