Thursday, December 17, 2015

Battle of the Brains

Battle of the Brains
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.