My science column today (read it here) is a perhaps over-long celebration of academic high-school competitions, like math teams and FIRST robotics. It mentions three items from recent competitions but doesn’t explain them due to lack of space - but sends readers here for more info. So here goes:

Fermi Question: I hate to say it, but the Wikipedia article is terrific. It refers to physicist Enrico Fermi, so famous for his ability to make excellent rule-of-thumb estimates about experimental situations that it has become a catchword. The New Hampshire Science Olympiad has a whole section called Fermi Questions, testing teams’ abilities to make good estimates.

Three consecutive even integers: One of the problems on the 2009 New Hampshire State Mathematics Contest tells students to prove, “by induction if necessary,” or disprove several statements, including “The product of any three consecutive positive even integers must be a multiple of 8.” (I’m afraid I don’t know whether it’s true or false, and how to prove it.)

(ADDENDUM: My 18-year-old points out that proving it is easy: all even numbers are a multiple of 2 - so multiplying three of them together produces a number that is a multiple of 2 x 2 x 2! So they don’t have to be consecutive integers; the product of any three even positive numbers is always a multiple of 8.)

Robots and pink T-shirts: A team called Northern Force from Coos County, N.H., that regularly attends the FIRST robotics regional competition in Manchester’s Verizon Wireless Center always has its fans dress in hot pink T-shirts; they’re quite recognizable in the stands. This year, however, they worn bland T-shirts with a little pink lettering, alas.  The problem was that pink was used in the competition field to direct the video software in autonomous cameras, and officials were afraid a big pink swath in the stands would result in robotic confusion.