Fingers of fury solved hundreds of Rubik's cubes in near record times at Boston's Museum of Science. Called the You Can Do the Rubik's Cube program, students from 14 New England High Schools and Middle Schools worked in teams to solve the colourful cube.
The students who participated either used the cube in classes or were part of an after school club. And for a puzzle that is near impossible for some, the students make solving it sound easy.
Seth Kelly, 8th grade student, "Basically you just do a bunch of algorithms and each algorithm puts it into a different pattern and you just solve it."
Seth's record is 32 seconds. That's far off from the world record of five seconds, but for anyone who's attempted the cube it's still impressive. Teams of 8 worked together to solve 25 cubes with the fastest time winning. Sometimes certain students would solve the cube up to one point then pass it on to a partner who specialized in solving a differnt part of the cube.
Students in the solo competition had to be quick with all of the steps of solving the puzzle.
An MIT student and so called super cuber was on site to help judge the solo competition. He talked about his solving strategy.
Tim Reynolds, MIT student & MIT Rubik's Cube Club member, "So the strategy is to break down the cube in to a bunch of different pieces and solve a few pieces of the cube at once because there are 20 moving parts on a cube and that's too much to do in one go. So you break it down into substages and you recognise patterns that you start to form"
He showed us how he could solve the cube in under 30 seconds.
The competition was fierce. The cube isn't just a hobby, but a teaching tool.
Taylor Ackert, Engineering & Science University Magnet School, Connecticut, "It was my second year teaching and I had a mentor that had known how to use the cube and thought it was a great tool to use in my math classroom and so he taught all the teachers that yearin professional development how to do it and then helped me incorporate it inot my classroom and into my lessons. So typically I don't start using it until my geometry unit because it is a great three dimensional shape and we talk about the different moves and how that relates to math and it's also a great problem solving tool so figuring out how to use it and really critical thinking."
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