04.29.09
Charlotte, N.C. – A team composed of Charlotte Latin School sixth grade students Harrison Bell, Clyde Nelson and Shep Zoutewelle has won first place in the Southeastern region of the eCYBERMISSION competition.
The students each receive a $3,000 U.S. EE savings bond and an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C., where they will compete for the National Winner award. The national winner will receive a $5,000 U.S. EE savings bond and all other national finalists will receive a $3,500 U.S. EE savings bond.
Sponsored by the U.S. Army, eCYBERMISSION is a free, web-based science, math and technology competition for students in grades six through nine. The competition allows teams around the world to compete for regional and national awards while working together to solve problems in their community.
Teams in the eCYBERMISSION competition must design and carry out a project using a scientific procedure. Charlotte Latin’s team, called Team Dragonface, researched ways to make Halloween costumes more flame-resistant after reading articles about children being burned when their Halloween costumes caught on fire.
The students found several online solution recipes for making fabrics safer to wear. Firefighters from Station 9 visited Latin on October 28, 2008, to set fire to the costumes and the team discovered similar burn rates for treated and non-treated costumes. Charlotte’s local CBS affiliate, WBTV, filmed the experiment and ran the story during news broadcasts to warn parents that online recipes for fireproofing costumes do not work.
Since its inception in 2002, more than 46,000 students from the U.S., U.S. territories and Department of Defense Education Activity schools worldwide have competed in eCYBERMISSION, which has awarded more than $5.7 million in prize money in support of science, math and technology leaders of tomorrow.