A team of Lampeter-Strasburg (L-S) students won the bronze award in this year's Lincoln IU12 Fourth- and Fifth-Grade STEM Design Challenge. The L-S Castaways - consisting of fifth-graders Madison Adams, Esther Brubaker, Madison Carpenter, and Emma Stiles - ran with their teacher Eric Balak's suggestion to enter the competition to "improve or redesign the future of transportation." The students designed a floating car both protected by and powered by magnets.
"We were looking at circuits and realized that they used magnets to repel," said Balak. "That is when the idea was born."
The team researched, ideated, prototyped, and eventually settled on a car that uses magnetic levitation to reduce the need for fossil fuels and magnetic bumpers to repel objects and thereby soften the impact of collisions.
To gather additional feedback, the team enlisted the help of a crash expert. The girls called on Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Austen Barnett, a longtime friend of Balak's.
"It's very impressive that these students are thinking at such a high level," said Barnett. "I think we may be seeing some future engineers."
The L-S Castaways team submitted a prototype for its Maglev Car and came in third place out of the 30 teams from various schools. The students received medals from IU12.
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