Grade 5 students from Pleasantside elementary school got a chance to test the water at Rocky Point pool in Port Moody before its official opening for the summer season on Wednesday. But their dips weren’t necessarily planned.
In fact, the whole point of their visit was to stay dry for as long as possible as they paddled cardboards boats they designed and then built that morning from one end of the pool to the other. Not many succeeded.
Marty McKay, the school’s Grade 4-5 teacher, said teams of three students were assigned a limited amount of materials, including two sheets of cardboard, rolls of duct tape and packing tape, two pencils, a knife, a paperclip and 25 feet of string. They then had to concoct how to turn that into a watercraft that one student could paddle the length of the pool, and then keep all three team members afloat for two minutes.
It was, he said, a chance for the students to apply classroom lessons about buoyancy into real-life practice. Along the way they learned about research, teamwork and overcoming challenges.
“I hope when they come across a challenge, they can find other ways to look at it,” McKay said.
That’s exactly what Ashlyn Kelly, Kieran Scott-Moncrieff and Gabriel Pilas did. Their boat was the only one to keep a whole team dry for two minutes.
The students said their research told them they’d have the best chance to stay afloat by distributing their weight evenly. To test their theory, Ashlyn said she built a scale model out of paper at home and floated a doll in it.
But when it came time to design and construct their full-size boat, Ashlyn said they “just winged it.”
All they knew was to affix their tape as tightly as possible and not use too much on the boat’s bottom so it would turn into an anchor, said Gabriel.
Other boats weren’t so successful. Some sank almost immediately. A few survived the race but foundered the buoyancy test. By the end of the exercise, the pool’s deck was littered with heaps of soggy cardboard.
“I was really surprised some of them floated at all,” McKay said.
