Jesse Park and his peers put a little extra challenge on their quickly created miniature golf hole.
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“We have tape dunes,” Park said, proudly showing off his team’s creation during Gower Middle School’s recent STEM Challenge & Science Showcase. “They are like sand dunes.”
The tape dunes, the Gower Middle School 5th grader pointed out, would snag golf balls that made it past the initial pinball-type bumpers on the ramp but did not have enough speed to make it to the tube leading to the cup on the hole.
“You shoot up the ramp, but you can get stuck by the tape,” co-creator Rohan Chadha explained. “If you shoot it right, it goes into the box and then into the cup.”
Using two cardboard boxes, a lid, pieces of other boxes, part of a water bottle and tape, Park, Chadha and two other students teamed to make the challenging golf hole.
When it came time to break down the 20-minute creation and move the miniature golf hole into the land of recyclables, Chadha and company couldn’t do it. They moved their creation to the school’s lunchroom where co-creator Alex Hurka prepared to take it home.
“My mom said it was OK,” Hurka said. “It was a lot of fun to create and we didn’t want to get rid of it.”
It was Gower’s second STEM Challenge, promoting science, technology, engineering and math with students in fun activities.
“It’s always good when the students don’t want to go home,” said Rebecca Laratta, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and innovation in District 62 and coordinator of the STEM activities.
Laratta said the challenges, which included building with plastic cups and creating sailboats, engaged students in science activities and added to their education.
“They pick up a lot of knowledge in the process,” Laratta said.
Part of that knowledge was how form plays a role in determining performance.
Gower West 3rd graders Reyna Batra, Goda Balsys and Tema Alkhudari had a spirited discussion about how much tape to use, how big the sail should be and the right technique for blowing air through a straw to propel their vessel in the Sailboat Challenge.
Students tested their handiwork by blowing air through a straw as their sailboat floated in a gutter of water. One of the first two teams to test the performance of their creation, the girls recorded a time of 16.63 seconds,
“We were so close but they beat us,” Alkhudari said of a team of boys who tested their vessel at the same time as the girls and finished three seconds sooner.
“We should have made a bigger sail,” Batra concluded.
“Yeah, their sail was a lot larger than ours,” Alkhudari agreed.
Laratta said she was thankful for the support she received from staff and parents to help make the event “bigger and better” in its second year.
Kevin Beese is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.