A10 l SATURDAY, JUNE 8 , 2019 ROCKET-MINER
119531; 87226; Color; 4 x 5
By AMBER PEABODY
Cody Enterprise
Via Wyoming News Exchange
CODY — Instead of your typical test, Heart Mountain Academy
students had a more exciting math and science final last week.
The students created their own trebuchets and tested them by
launching water balloons at HMA principal Beth Blatt.
“It was a really fun project and the most fun final I’ve ever
done,” sophomore Cody Downer said.
A trebuchet is a type of catapult that uses a swinging arm to
throw a projectile.
Science teacher Ben Larsen gave the students a small model to
build so they could study the physics of the devices.
“First we built the small versions and timed those by three to
get all the dimensions (for the larger ones),” junior Abby Schuster
said. “Then we had to figure out the right weight for it.”
Trebuchets work by using the energy of a falling counterweight
to launch the projectile.
The students needed to earn STEM (Science, Tech-nology,
Engineering and Math) dollars to build their larger trebuchets,
which they did in business math.
“This was a practical way to apply the concepts learned in the
classroom,” math teacher Stephanie Gabriel said. “They needed to
earn money, write checks to the bank, balance their savings
accounts, as well as invest their earnings. We
alternated weeks between ‘learning’ weeks and ‘chal-lenge’
weeks.”
Once they’d earned enough for their materials, the stu-dents
spent about two weeks constructing their contrap-
tions.Rainy weather forced them
to test the trebuchets inside the Stock Activities Center using
tennis balls.
“We didn’t know if they would work, but they shot the
ball and worked great,” Larsen said. “In the Stock they got it
dialed in to where they were hitting a garbage can almost every
time.”
Schuster said the two con-traptions both had different
strengths.“One had a lot of accuracy
and the other had the best distance,” she said.
When they moved the tre-buchets outside for the final May 29,
the students faced a
new problem, as the machines were dialed in for tennis balls and
not water balloons.
“The water balloons were heavier,” Downer said.
Both groups had to add more weight to the trebuchets to launch
the water balloons. Blatt sat on a chair between the two groups as
“the castle.” The groups moved their ma-chines to try and get a
direct hit. After several close calls one balloon fell directly
into her lap.
“The crazy thing was the accuracy with the tennis ball versus
the water balloons,” Larsen said. “The balls are lighter and round
but there are so many variables due to the balloons’ weight and
shape.”
Gavin Strope also tested a smaller catapult and launched a
balloon that Blatt caught in her hands.
“There was another lesson,” Larsen said. “The catapult could be
reloaded quicker and launched faster but the trebuchets allowed
them to move back and shoot from farther away.”
At the end of the tests, the students snuck up behind Blatt and
pelted her with the remaining water balloons.
This is the second big STEM project HMA has tak-en on this year.
In the winter they designed floatable shoes to walk on water at the
Rec Center. Larsen said they plan more STEM projects next year.
“Our students were highly engaged throughout this project,”
Gabriel added. “By developing challenges throughout they invested
in their learning.”
Students build, test trebuchets for science class
CODY ENTERPRISE PHOTO/AMBER PEABODY
Heart Mountain Academy studwent Cody Downer launches one of two
trebuchets that were designed by students as part of their science
class.
By MICHAEL ILLIANO
The Sheridan Press
Via Wyoming News Exchange
SHERIDAN — State Auditor Kristi Racines unveiled a website that
will give Wyoming residents a glimpse of the state’s “check-book”
during the Wyoming Financial Transparency Working Group’s meeting
in Cheyenne on Wednesday.
The site, Wyopen.gov, allows visitors to search a database of
expenditure data from several state govern-ment agencies. Its
launch represents a concrete step toward improving access to
Wyoming’s financial records, which both Racines and Gov. Mark
Gordon — who partnered to create the working group — have made a
priority.
The state’s ability to provide digital access to its financial
records has been in doubt in recent years, with former State
Auditor Cynthia Cloud’s office facing a lawsuit for failing to
fulfill a request for vendor data submitted by Openthebooks.com.
Cloud said that the state’s outdated software made scrubbing
confidential data from ex-penditure records an arduous task.
In February, however, Rac-ines released six years’ worth of
state expenditure data to Openthebooks, fulfilling its request.
Wyopen offers public access to much of that data through a
searchable database.
“What we are really trying to do is be proactive and get this
information online, available, easy and in a usable format,”
Racines said.
Racines stressed that the site — which her office created
in-house — is a work in progress, though. There are significant
holes in the records stored on the site be-cause much of the
state’s ex-penditure data is considered confidential; the database
does not include payroll data, for instance.
The site has also highlight-ed what Racines sees as a more
fundamental obstacle
to financial transparency: The legibility of the records to the
average Wyoming resident.
Racines admitted that some of the records are still difficult to
parse through because the coding the Wy-oming State Auditor’s
office has traditionally used to track its purchases has filled the
database with thousands of extraneous codes.
“However basic or sophis-ticated our platform is, you are
limited to the quality and the structure of the data you have,”
Racines said.
Further, Wyopen’s data-base does not contain the state’s budget,
which Racines said will make it difficult for residents to consider
expenditures as part of a larger context. That may have more to do
with the intricacy of the budget than platform limitations, though,
she noted.
“You can only simplify a large, complex operation so much,”
Racines said.
Both Racines and Gordon have said they would like to explore
ways to improve the clarity of the state’s budget.
The process of tweaking Wyopen over the coming months will guide
the work-ing group’s efforts. The group tasked Sheridan-resident
Gail Symons with reviewing effective transparency sites from other
states and rec-ommending steps Wyoming could take to replicate
their success.
However, Symons said monitoring the develop-ment of Wyopen could
help the group establish metrics that would help it evaluate
alternative options, such as purchasing a more sophisti-cated
platform.
“The recommendation is basically: Go with what we’ve already
got,” Symons said.
Racines advocated a simi-lar approach.
“Is it the ultimate answer? We don’t know,” Racines said.
“Here’s where the value is: If we put this out for six months, or a
year, or two years, we’re going to get a lot of feedback.”
Auditor unveils financial transparency website By ANDREW
GRAHAM
WyoFile.com
GILLETTE — A legislative committee will consider a bill that
would subject a person to criminal trespass charges even when that
person was un-aware he or she was on private property.
The Joint Judiciary Commit-tee voted to consider a propos-al
brought by representatives of the farming and ranching industry
that would remove the word “knowing” from the current statute for
criminal trespass.
Law enforcement officials including a sheriff from Sher-idan
County and a prosecutor from Uinta County told law-makers the
change would make it easier for them to prosecute trespassers by
removing the requirement to prove intent. The change also would
remove the necessity for landowners to post private-property signs
or otherwise mark their property if they want to see a trespasser
prosecuted. Fences do not count as a private property marker in
Wyoming, according to a Legislative Service Office
attorney who addressed the committee Tuesday.
Wyoming law includes both criminal trespass and civil trespass
laws that would allow a landowner to sue. Today, criminal trespass
is a misde-meanor punishable by up to six months in prison and a
$750 fine. The draft bill ordered on Wednesday would up the fine to
$1,000.
The onus not to trespass can be shifted further to the public
because better and more available GPS and mapping technologies
today allow users to know whether they’re on private or public
lands, said Jim Magagna, Wyoming Stock Growers Association vice
pres-ident. That change, coupled with an increase in outdoor
recreation in Wyoming, spurred the discussion among
agriculturalists to change the law, he told lawmakers.
The increase in recreation has sparked more trespassing, he
said. “Particularly [by] people who are not native to this area and
don’t understand land-ownership patterns,” he said. “It’s very easy
for people to assume that so many of these wide-open spaces are
public lands.”Agricultural groups hope the
change would make it “more attractive” for county prosecu-tors
to pursue trespass cases, Magagna said. Many land-owners feel law
enforcement is reluctant to do so today, he told the committee.
The law change would include a protection for those who are led
astray by maps or phones. An accused trespasser who ends up on
private land even after “reasonable use” of GPS or a land status
map could invoke that use as a defense against the charge.
The committee embraced the change proposed by agri-culturalists.
Only Rep. Charles Pelkey (D-Laramie) voted against the motion to
have a bill drafted while the other 13 members supported the
action. The bill would give too much discretion to police and
pros-ecutors to pursue trespassers who may have merely made a
mistake, Pelkey said in a phone interview Wednesday.
“Right now there has to be an intent element to criminal
trespass,” said Pelkey, who is a defense attorney. “You have to
knowingly enter a property
knowing it’s private property and knowing you have no right to
be there.” The change, “virtually eliminates the intent element,”
and would make trespassing as easy to prosecute as speeding, Pelkey
said.
“A lot of the private property out there is not marked,” he
said.
The Powder River Basin Resource Council landowners’ group also
supported the bill, with a representative saying it would help some
of its members push back against oil-and-gas industry surveyors and
employees who stray, de-liberately or not, onto property where
companies don’t have the right to operate.
But the suggestion brought by bill proponents — of landowners
besieged by rule breakers and clueless outdoor recreationists and
unable to see laws enforced — sparked one member of the public to
say he’d like to see a matching law change for public land users’
benefit.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on
Wyoming people, places and policy.
Lawmakers eye stricter trespass laws at agriculture’s
request
