Rochelle Middle School eighth grader Angelina Godinez-Mendoza, foreground, with teammates Rogayh Alahwas and Zachery Flores, urges the team’s model boat along the course set up for the Middle School Manufacturing Challenge on Thursday at the LCC Aerospace and Advanced Manufacturing Center. A fourth member of the team, Dustin Clark, waited for the boat the end of the run.

What do you get when you get when you take a STEM-oriented design challenge and add water? A boat race where winning and losing take a back seat to learning.

The Middle School Manufacturing Challenge brought together two teams from each of LCPS’s middle schools on Thursday to compete with model boats the eighth graders designed on a computer and created with 3D printers. Some boats did better than others.

But that’s OK, according to Andrew Luppino, chair of the Computer-Integrated Machining Program at Lenoir Community College, which organized the challenge.

“Failure is OK,” Luppino said. “Just get back up, try again and make some adjustments. They’re learning something about the research and development process – what didn’t work, what do we need to fix, how do we fix that. Let’s get creative and think outside the box.”

In building their own model boat to use in tests, Luppino and his staff went through eight different designs before finding one that was viable – a fact he shared first off when he met more than two months ago to plan the challenge with STEM and technology teachers at the four middle schools – Contentnea-Savannah K-8, EB Frink, Rochelle and Woodington

The students in Shariden Lord Johnson’s class at Contentnea-Savannah began by crafting boat designs from popsicle sticks before turning to the computer-aided designs that produced a 3D-printed speedboat and catamaran. 

“The students worked so hard on this project,” Johnson said. “They started from the basics, learning about the different styles of hulls, which is more stable or which might capsize more, and the history of boats and how they affected our economy, our history and our culture. It’s been a fun nine weeks.”

The students brought to the races their best version of a battery-powered, propeller-driven air boat. The idea was that they would compete in time trials, sending their crafts down a 20-foot-long, water-filled trough. The reality was that they did the best they could.

“The first time I saw it, I thought this would be easy, but then I realized it was not,” said Angelina Godinez-Mendoza, a member of one of the teams from Rochelle Middle School.

The team’s secret for ironing out the design problems? “We just did it more than one time,” Angelina said, “and we did it in different ways.”

The challenge gave students creative latitude – a hallmark of the best kind of learning, according to Angelina. “It allows for students to make their own decisions,” she said. “It leaves it up to the students, instead of the teachers. Obviously, we had to follow directions, but other than those directions, we had endless possibilities.”