From the top streamed song in 2015 being Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson, all the way to A Bar Song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey in 2025, it’s safe to say that a lot has changed in the past 10 years. 

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the annual Normal West AP Physics Boat Regatta. 

On Jan. 16 2025, during 8th hour Mrs. Jade Griffin, a Physics and AP Physics teacher at Normal West, hosted the 10th consecutive AP Physics Boat Regatta located in the Normal West pool. 

For this project, the students had to make a boat only out of cardboard with tape as an adhesive. The

boat had to be capable of holding two people and had to can be launched and paddled across the pool. 

Every element of the board must be made out of cardboard, including the seats and paddles. 

Then, one by one, groups try to sail their boats across the pool with the fastest team to do so winning five points of extra credit.

When mentioning her favorite aspects of the game, Griffin mentioned the teamwork and engineering aspects that it took for this product, forcing the students to get creative and come up with ideas together. 

“I think the engineering aspect, the fact that they have to design the boat and then build it, but then also the team aspect, so they have to work with a team to do it,” Griffin notes of her favorite parts of the project.

This event is a great reflection of the class as many aspects of physics were involved in every step of the process in order to build a lasting boat as the students had to “consider the construction of the boat, design of the boat, so that they can through the water easily, and so applying the physics terms to this is something that’s a lot of fun,” Griffin adds. 

Not only was this project a reflection of the physics the students had to learn and then apply to their boat, but it was also a simulation of some possible real life scenarios that students would be dealing with in the future. 

“I think it’s a real world experience. Not that they’re gonna be building cardboard boats in real life, but a lot of them are [going to] go on to be engineers because this is the AP Physics class, and so getting some real world engineering experience, research experience, all of that’s what I hope they take with them,” Griffin said. 

The winners were determined from two potential categories: the boat that moved the fastest across the water and the boat that lasted the longest in the water before sinking. 

The winning lab group for both categories were Senior Jack Hanks, Junior Calvin Beyers, Junior Charles Brown II, and Junior Sebastian Liles.

“It was a little bit of a learning curve if hopping in a cardboard boat and pedaling and going crazy… we were pretty dialed in, we actually started getting a little tired because y’know we were going so far,” Hanks and Beyers, members of the winning team, mentioned.

With all the things changing in our world on a yearly basis, it’s great to see something as fun and productive as the boat regatta still being a staple in our school for the past ten years.