# Overkill school/boy scout/etc projects

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [December 7, 2003, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614 "2003-12-07T21:32:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Wearia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/13edae/32.png) [@Wearia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wearia)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2003, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614/1 "2003-12-07T21:32:28Z")

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I’m looking for examples of projects that young people have done for school marks, boyscout badges and so on that when far above and beyond requirements along with the realms of sanity.  
The best example I can think of off hand is David Hahn and his breeder reactor. But I’m sure that theirs more out there. Feel free to share your own as well.

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**Author:** ![John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ccd318/32.png) [@John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Kentzel-Griffin)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2003, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614/2 "2003-12-07T22:00:59Z")

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General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls. I’ll move this to IMHO for you.

Off to IMHO.

**DrMatrix** - GQ Moderator

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**Author:** ![gcarroll](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/65b543/32.png) [@gcarroll](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gcarroll)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2003, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614/3 "2003-12-08T01:19:21Z")

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“Phage” built a tiny “clean room” of plastic relying on a static charge on the plastic structure itself to temporarily suck the dust out of the air. Using this he modified a SCSI hard drive, replacing some of the metal exterior components with Plexiglas so you could see the astonishingly fast action inside.  
He connected this to a computer running disk diagnostics to make the cool bits keep moving, with a monitor reporting on the running total of the data transferred and various performance statistics.  
Combined with the required three fold poster board (with a discussion of how the heads detected the magnetic boundaries, how the controller interpreted the boundaries as binary, how the error correction routines worked, etc.) I thought it made a pretty nifty sixth grade project.

(He got a “B”, by the way. )

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**Author:** ![Wearia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/13edae/32.png) [@Wearia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wearia)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2003, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614/4 "2003-12-08T02:01:41Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by DrMatrix \*  
> \*\*General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls. I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
> 
> Off to IMHO.
> 
> **DrMatrix** - GQ Moderator \*\*

:smack:  
See, that would explain why I couldn’t find this thread when I searched IMHO earlier.

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**Author:** ![Ace309](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ace309/32/1050_2.png) [@Ace309](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ace309)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2003, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/overkill-school-boy-scout-etc-projects/217614/5 "2003-12-08T02:15:16Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by gcarroll \*  
> \*\*(He got a “B”, by the way. ) \*\*

…! What did he do, pee on the teacher’s car?!