Students representing schools across the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District participated in a contest of wits at Skyview Middle School over the weekend, Mind-A-Mazes. A total of 37 teams from all over the peninsula joined the annual STEM competition on Saturday, Oct. 19. The competition challenges kids to work as a team to accomplish engineering-style tasks, like building a car out of a mousetrap.
The mousetrap was part one of this year’s challenge: harness the potential energy of an unsprung trap, use it to propel a vehicle through a narrow lane and strike a small target (a can) at the other side. Student teams had several weeks to collaborate and prepare their cars, and they earned points in the contest for the distance their cars traveled and whether or not they hit the target.
The second element of this year’s competition was a spontaneous challenge in which teams were given a bag of miscellaneous objects to use to construct a tower. The objects, 20 popsicle sticks, and 10 toothpicks, then had to support an amount of weight chosen by each team. Teams received points for their tower’s height and the amount of weight it held.
“[It was] just fun to see the kids doing it,” said KPBSD superintendent Clayton Holland, who was invited to be a judge in this year’s contest. “A lot of times kids, when they’re in the math or sciences or you know, they like to work by themselves, right? That’s the comfort zone. And this forces [them] to work as a team and come together and communicate with each other.”
Teams were divided into two divisions: Junior and Intermediate. In the Junior division, the Peachy Peaches, a team from Kenai Middle School, took first place. The Pepsi Lovers from Nikiski Middle/High School took first overall in the Intermediate.