FORT BENNING, Ga., (May 4, 2016) -- Tackling the issue of childhood obesity head-on, four Faith Middle School eighth-graders won first place in the state of Georgia during a national science competition for their idea on how to fight the expanding waistlines of children.
Every year students at Faith Middle School are given project-based assignments to complete each quarter. As part of their assignment for science, students in Susan Cabeceiras' classes participated in the Toshiba and the National Science Teachers Association's ExploraVision science competition and eCYBERMISSION.
ExploraVision is for students gradesK-12. It encourages them to come up with solutions to real-world problems that might occur in 20 years using knowledge acquired through science, technology, engineering and mathematics based learning.
eCYBERMISSION is a web-based STEM competition for students who are in sixth through ninth grade. It is sponsored by the Army Educational Outreach program. Like ExploraVision, it asks students to create a solution to a real-world problem, only these problems don't have to be futuristic, just ones present in the students' community.
Eighth-graders Joseph Cannaday, Dylan Hernandez, Christopher Paine and Tyler Brady won first place in the state of Georgia in the eCYBERMISSION competition for their experiment on childhood obesity. They each received a $1,000 savings bond.
After some deliberation, Paine said the group settled on the issue of childhood obesity because they felt coming up with a solution to this would most benefit the community.
Cannaday explained that he and his team members decided to see if 15 minutes of daily exercise would help make his fellow students healthier and improve their scores on different portions of the physical fitness test.
"We had a control group that didn't do anything while the other group participated in the exercise every day at lunch for two weeks," added Hernandez.
According to Hernandez, the judges' comments indicated that there was evidence that the experiment could improve the students' physical fitness test scores.
Eighth-graders Sarah Daknis, Kate Daknis and Alyssa Klark placed second in the state of Georgia for the eCYBERMISSION competition. They were each awarded a $500 savings bond.
"We did a project on whether or not music would affect test scores," Sarah Daknis explained.
Sarah Daknis revealed that they distributed a math test to students twice, once with music and once without. She said the results were inconclusive.
Collin Cheney and Addison Hunter, sixth-graders at Faith Middle School, placed regionally in ExploraVision with their advanced military suit concept.
Cabeceiras said Cheney and Hunter were one of 24 teams chosen out of 5,000 to place regionally.
Cabeceiras added that many of the military children who competed had projects that would benefit the military.
"My partner and I thought of a military suit that would use chameleon skin to help it blend into its thermal and visual surroundings," said Cheney about their concept.
Cheney explained that in addition to being wrapped in chameleon skin, the advanced military suit will also have a bag to carry the chameleon's internal organs so that its skin would continue to function properly.
The suit would also feature a helmet that was connected to the organs via wire to monitor the brain for signals. Those signals would then alert the system, prompting it to change the chameleon skin, Cheney continued.
Olivia Andres and Alejandra Escobar, also sixth-graders at Faith Middle School, received an honorable mention.
For the competition, they created the Aerius Board, a device that uses holograms while allowing its operator to complete most standard computer tasks.
"I drew out on a piece of paper what I thought would be cool and then I pitched the idea to Alejandra," Andres said about the Aerius Board's origins.
Escobar explained that she and Andres created a lot of history behind the board.
Both revealed that they were confident in their project.
"I felt like as long as we did our best, then that was good," Escobar said.
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