Edna Louise Spears’ future engineers

Fifth grade students in Port Jefferson’s Edna Louise Spear Elementary School have been learning the engineering design process. They have used their skills to construct pompom launchers with a set number of simple objects including straws, popsicle sticks, tape, string and plastic cups to see how far their experiments could go.

As engineers, they examined the materials they could use, came up with their designs and moved on to building, testing, modifying and testing again. 

The students in Kari Costanzo’s class conducted an informal contest to see who developed the simplest and cheapest one (Nina Gnatenko), the sturdiest one (Kemp Garrett) and the one that went the farthest (Clara Pearce).