MANSFIELD — Forty Hillsdale Middle School students set sail on a unique lesson about teamwork Friday afternoon.
The eighth graders spent the first half of their day building cardboard boats, which they’d race during the second half of the day at the Mansfield YMCA.
The students were divided up into teams of four, and each team received two 4-by-8-foot pieces of cardboard, one 4-foot cardboard tube and three rolls of packing tape to build their boats.
“The goal was to teach them teamwork, how to work together, and visualization, measurement and learning to work with only the materials provided,” history teacher Todd Miller said.
Students with enough “positive behavior” points were able to attend the all-day event. Points are earned by completing homework and good attendance.
Miller says he got the idea last spring while watching Channel 8 News. He saw a Cleveland school holding a similar event, and began looking for a way to introduce the experience of cardboard boating building to his own classes. Using it as a reward for well behaved students seemed ideal.
At noon, the contest began. Students boarded their boats in groups of two and aimed to paddle as far as they could across the YMCA’s pool.
Unsurprisingly, most of the boats met their unfortunate fates quickly. One or two capsized immediately as their riders climbed aboard, and even more gave out before making it halfway across the pool.
But a few managed to navigate from start to finish.
The Speed Demon, manned by Vincent Scalesi and Drew Johnson, was the first to make it the entire length of the pool, and later when facing off against the other semi-finalist, the Speed Demon won again.
Scalesi and Johnson built the boat with Nolan Walker and Braydon Rakovec.
“We tried to make it really stable, and we think it paid off,” Scalesi said. “We made it so it would cut through the water with less resistance.”
“And we put tape around itm so it wouldn’t get all soggy,” Walker chimed in.
“It was a team effort no one person made it,” Johnson said.
Even the teams that didn’t make it far still seemed to enjoy the day.
“We made a pontoon boat, and though it didn’t go far, it was just fun,” said Lauren Zeigler.
She, Anna Sparrow, Jacey Sermulis and Brooklyn Mills built their boat together, and it made it about one-third of the way across the pool before overturning.
