From combating America’s epidemic of childhood obesity to exploring the volcanic surface of Venus, Oxford Elementary’s fifth-graders have been hard at work building tools to solve tomorrow’s problems.
For their efforts, two OES teams, Team Fit and Venus Genius, managed to make it all the way to the finals Saturday at the annual Imagineers Contest.
‘Overall, we had a great group of kids to work with,? said OES teacher Mary Kraniak, who advised the teams and helped them prepare for the competition during lunch periods and after school. ‘They all showed excellent teamwork skills and got along great. They were a real pleasure to work with.?
Held at the Summit Place Mall in Pontiac, the design-build competition for fifth-graders featured teams from schools all over Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties.
Imagineers challenges each team to design and build a project to ‘fill a need and solve a problem.?
Using specified household materials, K’NEX toys (a more modern version of Tinker Toys) and three mystery items, each team of three students has one hour to reconstruct their model for judging.
Judging is based on creativity, functionality, integrity of construction, conformance to submitted design and effective integration of two of the three mystery items.
Team Fit, which consisted of fifth-graders Joshua Tucker, Aaron Marracco and Sarah Good, constructed a kids gym complete with stationary bikes, treadmills, weights, trampoline and a ‘human hamster wheel.?
To keep the kids entertained while they exercise, the gym even has the mother of all large screen televisions.
After reading on-line about how between 16 and 33 percent of children and adolescents are obese, the team decided something had to be done.
The students said they realized there are lots of gyms for adults, but none specifically geared toward kids.
Inspired by the Mars rover, the Venus Genius team, consisting of Greg Marshall, Jacob Alexander and Tyler McDaniel, decided to boldly go where no man has gone before by building a robotic rover to explore the second planet from the sun, Venus.
Instead of driving over the planet surface, the Venus rover uses rocket thrusters to hover around as it collects rock and atmospheric samples, analyzes them and transmits the data back to Earth.
The Venus explorer features drills to collect rock samples, solar panels to power it and a radar system to help guide it through the planet’s harsh atmosphere, which consists of clouds of sulfuric acid.
Three other teams from OES also competed in the Imagineers contest.
Tori Callender, Kristen Ewald and Julia Derringer worked together to create a donut maker, while Josephine Cates, Daniel Gervais and Brett Miller built a tree planter to counter the effects of deforestation.
In the category of something only a kid could invent, Shelby Mabry, Deandra Christiansen and Rebekah Krol pooled their resources to create a machine that does homework.
Now that’s using your imagination.