Kids bowl over inventor with science enthusiasm

Dr. Forrest Bird, a famous aviator and the man who’s considered the inventor of the modern-day respirator, confessed to the almost 300 kids crammed into Gonzaga’s Cataldo Hall on Friday: “I am mystified when I see what you are doing here.”

Bird was referring to the hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars constructed by students as part of the National Middle School Science Bowl.

“At your age, I was building homemade tractors,” he said.

But, Bird added, “technology is the way to the future, it always was, and what you are going to invent is going to be fantastic.”

The middle school contest attracted 33 teams, one from as far away as Boise. Two Spokane schools, All Saints Catholic School and St. Aloysius Catholic School, were there.

“Learn your arithmetic in fourth and fifth grade, because once you get to high school you are going to be so happy you paid attention to the basics,” said Bird. “You can’t jump from A to B. It takes time to get to where you are going.”

That was the lesson of the day.

Teams of students lined up their hand-built race cars, which mostly looked like shoebox-size go-karts with batteries and plastic syringes where the engine would be. Some never took off. Others sprinted ahead.

Four cars raced at a time, with the 16 fastest cars returning for the finals.

One of the first winners was from Timberlake Junior High School in Spirit Lake, Idaho.

“I guess we just beat all of them,” said Rae Hohle, 12. “I built the car. The chassis is cardboard. And the syringes have the oxygen and the hydrogen needed to make it run. It runs when you push the button and charge it.”

Another winning team came from Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy.

“We’re called ‘the Clever Ones,’ ” said Evan Barton, 13. “We used this type of plastic board that is like poster board, for the base of the car.”

His teammate, Selena Yates, 13, said the most difficult part of constructing the racer was the gears.

“It was just hard to get them to mesh,” she said, before they headed off to get ready for the next heat.

The only thing the teams didn’t construct was the actual hydrogen fuel cell.

Kay Kamp, who teaches fifth- to eighth-grade math and science at St. Aloysius, is the Northwest regional coordinator for the National Middle School Science Bowl.

“The contest is a combination of the car races today (Friday) and an academic part Saturday,” said Kamp. The winning team goes to Denver for the national finals in June, she said.

The U.S. Department of Energy sponsors the science bowl. More than 17,000 students from middle and high schools in 41 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands will compete.

Dennis Kimberling, a science teacher at Lakeland Junior High in Rathdrum, is the co-coordinator and ran the races Friday. The afternoon also featured a tractor-pull contest, in which the little racers pulled bigger and bigger loads.

Kamp said most regional competitions are held at sites such as research laboratories that sponsor the events. “We had to do our own fundraising, and we are so thankful that Bird Aviation Museum and Invention Center helped us,” she said.