On Oct. 28, no pumpkin at WJ was safe. Not from art students, who mutilated the gourds to resemble the faces of monsters. Not from tech ed students, who built elaborate catapults and trebuchets to fling pumpkins across the length of the football field. And not from student volunteers who skipped lunch to devour pumpkin pies in the spirit of competition.

The annual “Bad Day to be a Pumpkin” event at WJ is the product of hours of classwork in engineering and art classes. In particular, the engineering and technology education classes that design, build and test the catapults that competed against each other spend dozens of hours working out the details of their projects.

“It involves lots of math – checking angles and geometry,” said technology education teacher George Lavelle, whose class built the “Concrete Destroyer” trebuchet. “We designed our trebuchet, in part, using AutoCAD [an engineering software program].”

The range of the Concrete Destroyer was estimated at 30 yards, which Lavelle described as “average” relative to the other pumpkin launchers.

Technology education teacher Kevin Daney and his class opted for a different launch mechanism. Their slingshot design involved placing a pumpkin on a wood and foam glider and launching it upwards along a track using an elastic band.

“We wanted to do something different,” said Daney. “There is a creativity aspect as well as an engineering aspect [to our design]. The previous year, our engineering class wanted to make a large foam plane, but they never finished. What we decided to do was to use a different launch mechanism – to use small foam planes to allow the pumpkins to glide, rather than just use brute force.”

While Daney expressed disappointment that the slingshot pumpkin launcher malfunctioned before the most carefully designed gliders were launched, he credited the students for their hard work in building and testing their device.

“I was happy with what the kids did,” said Daney. “I was happy with the event.”

Art classes added to the day’s events with elaborate pumpkin carvings, displayed behind the tennis courts. One featured a carving of a Spider-Man mask. Another was carved in the shape of a Roman gladiator’s helmet, while another carving was of a face overrun by spiders fashioned out of metal nails.

One of the few non-pumpkin related events of the day was the costume contest. Awards were given for the scariest, funniest, most original and overall best student costumes. Senior Jimmy Parker received the award for the most original costume: “Occupy WJ.”

“The political joke adds to the effect,” said Parker. “It really separates me from just being a hippy [for Halloween]. All the social studies teachers loved it.”

As it does every year, Bad Day to be a Pumpkin put the spotlight on students and their work building the catapults, carving the pumpkins or just gorging themselves on pumpkin pies in record time. Already, engineering teachers are coming up with new ideas for next year’s catapults. WJ can only wait to see what next year’s Bad Day to be a Pumpkin will bring.