Congratulations to Deer Lakes fourth-graders Wren Andrie, Sophia Crow, Daniel Fels, and Brooklynn Persinger who earned first place in the Elementary Division of the STEM Design Challenge!

“I don’t think I’ll forget that moment,” Daniel said. “It really gives us a sense of accomplishment and a boost of confidence going to states. It kind of caught us off guard.”

Shocked was the most used word to describe their emotions.

“I just know my face looked like a tomato and my jaw hurt (from smiling so much),” Sophia said.

“It means a lot to us, because it’s our first year trying this,” Brooklynn added. “The other kids on other teams looked good and some of them were in fifth grade, so we weren’t expecting first place at all after looking at everyone else’s builds. Everyone else was really good, and I honestly thought the team that placed third would have been the winners.”

For the competition, the team built a prototype machine that uses pyrolysis to break down landfill plastic and recycle it as fiberplastic and plastoline, a fuel similar to gasoline

“We wanted to help sea creatures live better lives,” Sophia said. “The money that we would get from selling the diesel fuel would be donated to Team Trees. We wanted to help ecosystems as much as possible in the sea and on land.”

“Anything we can do to make the world a better place to live, we should try it,” Daniel said. “We should try to make the air clean and the seas clean.”

The team took on a variety of roles to build their prototype and used their time wisely in and out of school.

“We all worked together, and we all had our own parts,” Wren said. “We had tubes, pyrolysis, blenders, and other parts, so everyone had their own part. When it came together it looked good. I feel like that helped us get first place, and we also had a good presentation, too. We practiced a lot together to be ready. We even practiced on remote days.”

The team also felt that having multiple objectives – removing plastic from the sea and using funds to donate to Team Trees – gave them an edge.

“I think something we learned from this project is any time we do a competition we should try to do a little bit extra,” Brooklynn said. “That’s a big part of what helped us get so far.”