Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Sibling rivalry propels train competition
Students from Spring-Ford Area Middle School, North Wales Elementary School use Skype to show off model maglev rail projects
ROYERSFORD » A good old-fashioned sibling rivalry helped students from across the county learn about the future of transportation Monday.
Seventh grade technology students at Spring-Ford Area Middle School and sixth graders from North Wales Elementary School, in the North Penn School District, participated in the fourth an- nual Maglev Train Competition. The two schools demonstrated t hei r knowledge of the innovative transportation system and competed to see who could design the fastest model train.
“We’re having an interactive Skype competition with North Wales Elementary School,” said Spring-Ford technology teacher Ian Fickert. “My brother teaches there. This is the fourth year for the competition. Both of our students go through the same process.”
With Maglev, short for magnetic levitation, researchers have found a way for a train to literally hover off its track and propel it forward using electromagnets. Reaching speeds around 360 mph, a Maglev train could reach Washington, D.C. from New York in roughly an hour non- stop, for example. Fickert and his brother Derek work together to teach the cutting-edge technology to their respective classes and hold the competition each year as a fun way to generate excitement among students about the project.
“We work on this for eight to nine weeks,” Fickert said. “One or two times a week we work on it as a class and then we finish up the very last week here in the marking period with our competition.”
“They’ve been excited,” he continued. “Last week they’ve been getting pretty excited. We did our class competition. That was exciting, so I think
they’re ready to go for today.”
Students are divided into teams of six to eight people and tasked with researching, designing, drawing and building their magnetic levitation train. Each team member is given a responsibility for a certain part of the project including: project manager, research planner, design planner, map/ route planner, presentation planner, building planner and testing and redesign coordinator. The teams are responsible for designing a travel route for a crosscontinental Maglev train in the United States starting in New York and ending in San Francisco. The teams choose three additional cities with a population of more than 500,000 where the train can make a pit-stop and work to budget the costs associated with the project. Each team then creates a Styrofoam train for the competition. Each train has to weigh more than 0.70 ounces and is sent down a 10-foot model Maglev track.
Before the competition, two teams from each school gave presentations to show their travel route and discuss what they learned. Students used the software Prezi to allow both schools to view each slide of their presentation simultaneously.
Af ter ward st udents sent their trains down the miniature Maglev track. The trains rest on a metal plate, which sits on magnetic strips.
“The tracks are exactly the same, my brother’s and
“We work on this for eight to nine weeks. One or two times a week we work on it as a class and then we finish up the very last week here in the marking period with our competition.” — Ian Fickert, Spring-Ford Area School District technology teacher
mine,” Fickert said. “Students run them down the track. They get five runs and we take the average times of their five runs and we see who the winner is.”
For the third year in a row, the winner came from Spring-Ford. Students Kieran Treece, Zacker y Male, Tori Seeley, Aly Sadownizake, Kaleigh Tomichek and Lucy Stone were crowned the victors for their train’s average time of 2.88 seconds.
“It was kind of fun, and it was fun doing the slides and doing it as a team with other kids,” Kieran said of the project.
“It was hard at times,” Lucy said. “… but overall we had a lot of fun.”
“It was fun to work with everyone,” Kaleigh said. “I liked designing and creating it.”