Cube Day Attracts Rubik’s Enthusiasts From Across Nation

On Oct. 3, the Academy hosted New Hampshire’s first official Rubik’s Cube competition in Grainger Auditorium. The Academy’s Cube Club ran this event from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and secured a total of 86 competitors from around the country—ranging from nine-year-olds to 60 year-olds—for its first annual Phillips Exeter Cube Day.

Cube Day consisted of eight events, including the speedsolving of the 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 6x6 and 7x7 cubes. The three other events were the solving of the Pyraminx, the 3x3 blindfolded and the 3x3 one-handed.

The Cubicle, a U.S.A.-based online speciality cube store, provided cash prizes for the fastest solvers in each category. In return, Cube Club allowed the company to set up a booth at the edge of the auditorium to sell puzzles, cubes and other related merchandise.

To make Cube Day results official, World Cube Association (WCA) delegate Tim Reynolds attended the event. He has been to over one hundred cubing competitions and has been in charge of monitoring events around New England, ensuring they are held to WCA standards.

“It’s going great,” Reynolds said at lunchtime. The event had been running ten minutes late—a tiny span of time compared to how long other [cube] competitions are delayed. “Mornings usually go a bit rocky and behind schedule. That’s expected. But we have a great turnout for a new state, which doesn’t always happen.”

“Phillips Exeter Cube Day was definitely a success and hopefully will continue to be in future years.”

Cube Day was an important step not only for the Academy, but for New Hampshire as well. The idea to host an event like this first came to upper Brandon Liu before he came to the Academy as a new lower, soon after he attended his first competition in his homestate of Ohio. He wasn’t sure if similar events were held in New Hampshire, so he had considered hosting one of his own.

As a first step, Liu created Cube Club during the spring of the 2014-2015 school year, hoping to gather those who were interested in cubing or speedsolving. After a few weeks of meeting on campus, members of the club decided to branch out and attended a competition at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://theexonian.com/2015/10/22/exeters-most-three-dimensional-club/

With the MIT competition as inspiration, Liu started planning Cube Day in late June and early July. He reached out to Reynolds, who provided advice about all aspects of the event. He also had to contact Student Activities and ensure that Grainger was available the week Reynolds was able to travel to Exeter.

Liu copied a website template that was created for events like these and filled in information specific to Cube Day before the site went live. He managed all of these aspects, along with many other details necessary to ensure the event progressed smoothly.

Upper Michelle Ramiz, who is the other co-head of Cube Club, got involved in the planning process once the school year started, handling coordination with food supplies and certificate printing.

“I’ve been involved in the process for a relatively short while, only since September, while Brandon is the one who did most of the organizational work,” Ramiz said. “[Brandon] put in a huge amount of work [over the summer] that ended up paying off spectacularly.”

Ramiz also described the competition as highly organized and “easily comparable” to the MIT competition the club attended last year. Math instructor Timothy Whittemore, who took over as club adviser last year, shared Ramiz’s sentiments.

“Over the summer, Brandon put an incredible effort into planning the event. He contacted Mr. Reynolds and all the people at PEA to figure out location, advertising, food, t-shirts and all the other bits that helped make it successful,” he said.

David Levine, 60, said that Phillips Exeter Cube Day was the first cubing event in which he had competed. He was the oldest competitor and attended the event with his son, Daniel Rose-Levine.

Over the summer, his son had asked him if he wanted to compete at Exeter’s Cube Day. “I said sure, I’ll do it sometime in the fall,” Levine said. “We’ll get t-shirts, and we’ll be a team. He said well, wait a second, you’ll have to get a lot better if we’re going to be a team.”

To practice, Levine found an event on the WCA website—which turned out to be Phillips Exeter Cube Day—and signed up. The two drove up from the Mid-Hudson Valley in New York. Although he described himself as “just above the bottom of the barrel,” he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. He said that the event was planned well with provided tables (unlike many other venues), clear directions and plenty of space for spectators.

Cube Day was also 13 year-old Judith Solis’ first competition. She drove from Connecticut—over two and a half hours—to get to the Academy. She only started learning how to solve cubes three months ago, but competed in four events: the 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 and Pyraminx.

“It’s well run, it’s very organized and everyone’s shouting out names so you know where to go and what to do,” she said, when asked about the competition. “I don’t think there’s much to improve on. It’s a very good competition,” Solis said.

Alexander Cohen, a 14-year-old ninth-grader from Lexington, MA, found Cube Day well organized compared to the other three competitions to which he has been. “[Cube Day’s] pretty well organized,” Cohen said. “Every competition that I’ve been to, they’ve lagged behind. The last one I went to, in Norwich, CT, we were struggling to finish before we lost the venue.”

However, Cohen said that the scheduling could have been made better; he thought that Cube Club was trying to fit too many events into a one-day competition.

Similarly, Whittemore noted that Cube Club should change a few minor things for next year’s event. T-shirts sold out quickly, so many competitors and spectators went home empty-handed. Parents had to go out of their way to eat lunch in town, and a coffee or tea table could have been set up for them as they arrived in the morning.

Overall, both the Academy students and competitors considered Cube Day successful, especially as a debut. Upper Isabel Bagger, who is part of Cube Club and volunteered at Cube Day, said that she couldn’t have imagined it going more smoothly. While talking to competitors, she learned that they were impressed at how organized everything was. Bagger recalled a specific moment that struck her and summed up the feel of the environment.

“During lunch, while everyone was eating pizza and, of course, solving cubes, a whole group of kids started chanting numbers, on and on, and I didn’t realize what was going on until Michelle [Ramiz] informed me that they were reciting pi as a group,” Bagger said. “Phillips Exeter Cube Day was definitely a success and hopefully will continue to be in future years,” she added. “Maybe we’ll even break some records next year.”

Contributions from Mark Blekherman