Breed students take to track for racing contest

LYNN – Racing fans at Breed Middle School had a bad day at the indoor “track” Wednesday when not one of the student-designed cars made it across the finish line.”Friction was your enemy,” said eighth-grade science teacher Cynthia Quaratiello.Students have been studying forces in motion in science class. Teacher Andrea Ogle said the first annual Speed Demon Competition was a way to wrap up one unit and launch into the next, which will be Newton’s Laws of physics.”And we thought it would be fun,” she said.Click for a photo galleryStudents had to use lessons learned about friction and thrust to build a balloon powered car. Ogle said there were also rules such as the car could be built out of anything but powered only by no more than two balloons and must have a minimum of three wheels. Wheels were defined as anything that goes around but they couldn’t come from a toy car, students had to construct them.Although no one made it across the finish line of the five-meter racetrack there were winners. Devyn Astuccio, 14, walked away with the top trophy because her car made it the farthest. Her lightweight design made largely of paper and skewers looked a little like an old school dragster with a narrow nose that came down to two tiny wheels. The rear wheel was a soda can that she had punched a hole in to drain.”I was just looking at things that would roll and saw the soda can,” she said.Awards were also given to three students, one from each class, for creative design.Charles Alves, 14, and Alfred Davis, 13, split a creative design trophy for their car fashioned out of a small round KFC to-go container and bottle caps. Morse said what impressed her most was the research and thought put into the thrust design, which included blowing up on balloon inside the other for a bigger power boost.Abigail Sopor, 14, also took home a trophy for creative design.Sopor said she noticed her father drinking from a plastic bottle and it occurred to her that particular bottle would make a good chassis. She said she stabilized it with two thin pieces of wood and added a Styrofoam nose cone for drag resistance.Ogle said she knows Sopor built at least three prototypes before settling on her final model.The students were required to create their final race car in class. Quaratiello said that was to ensure that the students did the work themselves with no outside help.The walls of the track proved to be the undoing for many of the racers. Ogle said many of the students practiced on the classroom floor which had no barrier wallsThe small ride designed by Raymi Ramirez and Jonathan Mola jumped out fast but ran up against the wall, which dragged it down.”I think we would have made it to the end because in the classroom it went 6.5 meters,” Ramirez said.Ogle said she knew some of the cars had issues going into the finals but, for a first-time event, she was pleased with the outcome.”This is the first time we’ve conducted this activity,” Quaratiello told the 330 students gathered for the race. “So the teachers were learning just as much as you ? I hope you learned something.”Chris Stevens can be reached at [email protected].