QUEST students from Heritage, Green Springs, and
Westview placed in the top 20 out of 520 entries in the Burns and McDonnell
Battle of the Brains competition. The
competition gave students in the greater Kansas City area to compete to design
the next great exhibit for Science City at Union Station. The QUEST team
received an honorable mention and $2,500 in grant support for their entry,
Mission to Saturn. Mission to Saturn was designed to take visitors on a mission
deep into space to compare Saturn and Earth, observe Saturn’s place in our
solar system and discover all about Saturn’s composition, rings and moons.
The fifth graders
from Heritage were the project managers for the exhibit design project. They
mapped out the parts, the timeline to do it, and how everyone would
participate. All of the QUEST students from Heritage, Green Springs, and
Westview worked together to brainstorm, research, design, sketch, and model the
exhibit design. They also wrote a description of the design and created a
video. In this project, QUEST students were designers, engineers, builders,
researchers, writers, graphic artists, sculptors, astronomers, video producers,
and project managers.
The QUEST
students from all three schools had a chance to get together with each other
for Skype call with an exhibit designer, a visit with our Battle of the Brains
mentor from Burns and McDonnell, a field trip to Science City, and the Battle
of the Brains ceremony at Union Station.