MARYSVILLE – You have 30 ping pong balls, several sheets of copy paper, a roll of mailing labels, four drinking straws and a feather.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to take these items and build a self-supporting tower that will hold as many of the ping-pong balls as possible. Your work area is whatever can fit inside the diameter of a Hula-Hoop and you have 11 minutes to complete it.

That’s what the fifth graders at Creekview Intermediate were charged to do today during Challenge Day, where representatives from Honda of America Manufacturing show up to help instruct the kids how to work together in teams – and perhaps even learn something themselves.

In the Creekview gymnasium today, in four different hour-long sessions, about 15 teams of five students each were given 660 seconds in each session to conceive, design and construct a tower using only materials that could be found inside a plastic container about the size of a shoebox which was issued to each group, along with a Hula-Hoop and some floor space for a work area. Scissors were provided to cut the paper, but were not allowed to be used in the structure.

Points were awarded to each team for each level completed, for the number of ping-pong balls that were contained in the structure and double points were given to the overall score if the feather was placed on top of the finished structure. The teams were also responsible for totaling their own scores before being double-checked by the instructors.

The basic idea is to get the kids to work together to create something of use, work engineers do every day when they are designing cars or trucks. Identify the need, design the structure, engineer the model. Some of these kids may very well be using this same method to one day design and build those flying cars that we were all promised as children.

For having only 11 minutes to complete the task, each of the 15 teams did very well indeed, with the picture of the winning team from the first session accompanying this article. Complete with the feather on top.

Celia Nalley, Jennifer Wood and Josh Strother, all of whom are associates for the logistics, education and organizational teams at Honda of America, helped design the project and were all on hand at Challenge Day, to explain the process, outline the project, answering questions when needed and basically keep thing rolling.

We spoke to all three between sessions on the importance (and fun) for Challenge Day:

And as noted above, the kids were not the only ones who learned something at Challenge Day. Instructions for the project were taped to the inside of the lid of the plastic box given out to each group. It was clearly defined that only the contents inside the box itself were to be used for the project. One of the groups considered that black-letter law, so the instructions and tape, being inside the box, were fair game as construction materials and used accordingly.

Those kids are going places.

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