Boat-making challenge draws students from O'Hara, North Allegheny, other schools

Area students are part of a record-breaking, boat design challenge with more than 10,000 students from 134 schools across the state presented by Remake Learning Days Across America, a national nonprofit that started in Pittsburgh.

Boatbuilding makes for an appropriate STEAM design challenge because the effort involves many areas of STEAM expertise, including design, geometry, and physics and promotes collaboration, said Dorie Taylor, producer for Remake Learning Days Across America.

In the Fox Chapel School District, Layla Sullivan, a second-grader, floated her tinfoil boat and loaded it up with pennies to see how heavy a load the tiny vessel floating in water in a plastic bin could withstand – 23 pennies. “I liked making my boat, it was really pretty and I like to add all of the pennies,” Sullivan, a second-grader at O’Hara Elementary School in O’Hara Township, said on May 10.

Then it sank.

Sullivan was back at the drawing board to build a stronger boat, conferring with another student online at an elementary school in the Poconos.

Sullivan was among hundreds of area students participating in the educational project from the Fox Chapel Area School District, Chartiers Valley School District, Franklin Regional, Shaler Area, North Allegheny and other schools.

Individual students were paired with students outside of their school district who communicated virtually to collaborate on design and inevitably on re-design of their small tinfoil boats to carry a cargo of pennies.

“While making new connections, these students are also immersed in a fun design challenge and learning to work collaboratively,” said Dorie Taylor, producer of Remake Learning Days Across America.

The boat-building exercise was an opportunity for students to engage in problem-solving, said Kristy Batis, principal of O’Hara Elementary School.

The students were surprised when their boats sank so quickly and others could not believe how many pennies their flat-bottomed boats could hold.

“It’s about trial and error,” said Cari Kelm, who coordinates STEM education for Shaler Area students in grades K-3. Students had to come up with a different design when their boats sank.

“Learning through failure is one of the major goals of STEM education,” Kelm said.

Shaler had 100 students in second grade participating in the shipbuilding exercise collaborating with the Blue Mountain School District in the southeastern part of the state, outside of Allentown.

At Chartiers Valley primary school, Collier Township, 160 students in the first and second grades participated in the boat building project.

“The brainstorming part was just as much fun as building the product for the students,” said Emily Mather, principal at Chartiers Valley primary school.

The students enjoyed the entire boat-building process, she said. “They got to talk about what worked and what didn’t.”

The Franklin Regional third graders were paired with first graders from the Altoona Area School District

By the end of the day, one of the boats created by third graders at Franklin Regional could hold 91 pennies, according to Carmen Loughner, instructional technology coach for grades k-5 at Franklin Regional.

The secret was to design the boats long and flat from the five-inch-by-11-inch pieces of aluminum foil and spread the pennies out along the width of the boat, she said.

Promoting their motto of the 5Cs – communication, critical thinking, collaboration, citizenship and creativity – the Franklin Regional students shared their boat designs with the students from the Altoona school district, Loughner said.

“When we paired up what worked for us, the Altoona first graders made boats that were similar to what we made,” she said. “Not only do we do the 5Cs here, but we can help people online across the state.”

Remake Learning Days Across America has become the nation’s largest family-friendly learning festival, hosting more than 2,350 events and reaching 175,000 families, organizers said. This year, the nonprofit’s learning festival sponsored more than 175 hands-on learning events in the southwestern PA region.

Other partners for the boat-building project include the educational group, discoverED and The Grable Foundation.