Published July 12, 2009
By Jay Edwards
The Charlotte Observer
Harrison Bell, Clyde Nelson and Shep Zoutewelle were supposed to be taking a break from schoolwork.
Instead, the Charlotte Latin sixth-graders spent much of the past month finishing a science project.
It wasn't just any project. It won them the eCybermission national championship, and each got an $8,000 savings bond.
Harrison, Clyde and Shep, who form team “Dragonface,” had worked on the project since the beginning of the 2008-09 school year. They tested a solution they created to see if it would make children's Halloween costumes less flammable.
They decided to tackle the problem when they learned, through research, that last fall many people had been burned while wearing Halloween costumes.
So, with help from Charlotte Fire Station No. 9 on McKee Road, they created a borax and water solution that helped prevent certain costumes from burning as fast as they had. They tested the solution under the supervision of Station No. 9 and found it did not protect polyester costumes, but worked on cotton.
“This project is about real science,” said adviser Sharon Oats. “They identified a problem, came up with a possible solution.”
The three 12-year-olds recently presented their project to a panel of Army judges in Washington, D.C., in the national eCybermission finals.
“I definitely didn't want to do any schoolwork,” Shep said. “We really didn't know what to expect. But it turned out to be one of the greatest weeks of my life.”
The championships are designed to attract young people to engineering and the Army. The trip for the boys was highlighted by a limousine ride from the airport to their Pennsylvania Avenue Marriott hotel. They took insider tours to Arlington National Cemetery, Walter Reed research facilities and the Pentagon. They also visited the Washington Monument and the Lincoln, Korean and World War II memorials.
“The whole thing was first class, from start to finish,” said Oats, who accompanied the boys. She has been a science teacher for 29 years, nine at Charlotte Latin.
More than 12,000 students representing over 2,000 teams from around the world entered the Army's Web-based science, math and technology competition. The final 16 teams (four for each grade level, sixth through ninth) were invited to Washington.
“It was hard to believe that we actually won it all at first,” Clyde said. “But once it set in, we all loved it, because we really felt like all of our hard work finally paid off.”
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