When I was just a young lad attending elementary school I became fascinated by the Rubik’s cube. I learned to solve the cube shortly after getting one, and after more research into what’s called speed cubing found a faster way to solve the cube. However, after learning a faster way and getting my times down to under 30 seconds I became busy with other things and sort of lost my spark to continue practicing.

I’ve decided that for my learning project I would like to continue my learning journey with speed cubing. To start I decided to get a baseline of where I am at with what’s called an average of 5 (Ao5). This is the most common way to judge the speed at which someone can solve the cube. The average is calculated by taking 5 solves and removing the fastest and slowest times, the 3 middle times then are averaged to get the Ao5. My baseline average was the following: 26.61, (33.47), 32.61, 31.50, (23.89)= 30.24 seconds (the times in brackets are the fastest and slowest times which get removed). You can also see all of the solves in the video below.

This leads me into the struggles and the goals I would like to set. The major struggles I noticed were how inconsistent my times are, how much slower I have gotten, I have also forgotten a few techniques I new that will help me solve faster. My aim is to improve my Ao5 to be consistently under 23 seconds over the course of this semester. To do this I will be practicing with at least one Ao5 per day, as well as learning more skills to help improve my times. The main thing I’m going to be learning is a bunch of what are called algorithms. These are just a series of turns on the cube which are needed to solve the last portion. There are 57 I need to learn in something called OLL, which I plan to do through varies methods online. There are also more advanced tricks I will look to learn, I will explain them more once I do learn them. Here’s a video explaining the method I use to solve the cube if you are more interested in how it works and how I will improve:

I will be using a site called cstimer to track my times. It looks like this: This site generates random ways to scramble the cube and will keep track of all my times and will calculate my Ao5 for me. It also tracks a lot of other stats like my best time, best Ao5 and more. I am using a special timer called a stackmat timer, which just allows more accurate timing. Finally, I have a special Rubik’s cube which, as you can probably guess, allows for faster and easier turning.

I hope I can make child Kamden proud!