Start Your (Wind-Powered) Engines!

Two plastic straws. Two wooden skewers. Two pieces of cardboard. One sheet of paper. One fuzzy pipe cleaner. And one plastic bag.

On Wednesday morning, students at Bishop Woods Architecture & Design Magnet School had less than three hours to arrange those household items into roving vehicles whose wheels would turn on wind power alone.

In a school-wide assembly in the gym, the grades would face-off against each other. With a box fan blowing gusts of air, whichever sail could carry its vehicle farthest would be crowned the winner.

For the students, the race — with cars of their own making — was better than the Indy 500. As soon as it was over, they were begging for it to happen again next year.

The event came together as a way to practice the design process. That’s in keeping with the school’s magnet theme, which teaches students how to identify and solve problems like engineers. Throughout the year, that’s what students do as they build birdhouses, create model bridges, redesign the playground or plan a network of bike lanes in the neighborhood.

Bishop Woods even has its own school song about the five steps of the design process — ask, imagine, plan, create, improve — that kids recited by heart.

In small groups, students went through those steps at the Wednesday morning assembly as they made their ideas for a clean-energy car into a reality.

While manufacturing a car might sound easy enough, the students quickly found out that they had to think through several design problems.

At first, a few students attached their plastic bags at the wrong end, making it drag like a parachute rather than billow like a sail. But more commonly, many students made the car’s axles too tight for the wheels to turn, making it slide across the floor rather than roll.

Along the way, the students filled out a worksheet that guided them through the design process. It asked them to imagine the costs and benefits of having a wind-powered car, to sketch an initial blueprint, to explain the add-ons that eventually improved their car’s movement, and to reflect on their successes, surprises and challenges.

As the clock ticked down, the teachers behind the competition — Cara Campo and Victoria Raucci, the magnet resource coordinators, and Jamie Sirico, the library media specialist who runs the design lab — walked around to see how the cars were coming along.

Some students ran around them, as if they were working in a real pit-stop, as they tested out improvements.

In seventh-grade, a group of girls — Sha-ron Gorham, Madison Hushion, Kristina Sandoval and Karen Ramirez — realized that their vehicle was wobbling off-course because it was too light and flimsy. ​“We need a weight,” one said. They added a purple stick-figured driver, bent out of the pipe cleaner, and balled-up masking tape to load it down.

And in fourth-grade, three students — Mia Rivera, Deymar Velazquez and Adilanis Ortiz-Cardona — had created a cross-like mast to maximize their bag’s airflow, but they too were having trouble with their car veering off course. They decided to tighten the axles by adding more tape diagonally across the central tube.

At 1 o’clock, Campo visited each classroom to collect one entrant that would represent the whole grade in a race.

The first race of the afternoon pitted kindergarteners against first-graders.

“Start your engines,” Sirico said.

After her countdown, the two-foot blades within the line of box fans whirred into motion. Near the starting line, the kids rose to their knees, craning over each other to see the take-off.

When their plastic bag inflated and the wheels started turning, the kindergarteners erupted with glee. They shrieked and clapped and shook their fists, as if they’d wagered all their piggy-bank savings on the outcome.

The school gym became as loud as a professional arena; a few students had to plug their ears against the noise. Sirico called it for the kindergarteners, then asked teachers for help keeping the winners, bouncing with excitement, off the course.

The upper grades were up next.

Campo connected to a brand-new projector that allowed her to use her laptop like a Skycam, broadcasting the race live on a big screen, so even students far in the back could see which cars were pulling ahead.

Once the race started, one car shot out ahead of the others. The fourth-graders, Mia, Deymar and Adilanis, looked on nervously, as their car couldn’t catch up. But just as it looked like the vehicle was about to come up short, their sail caught a second wind and lurched just far enough to come in first.

But Sirico called for an ​“instant replay,” running the vehicles again in a showdown between the two frontrunners.

This time, Mia, Deymar and Adilanis’s car went only a couple yards, before slowing down. Mia clenched her hands against her lips. But the other class’s car didn’t budge. Just as Sirico was about to call the race, Mia, Deymar and Adilanis’s car kept moving even farther ahead, sending the kindergarteners into another round of whoops. Mia jumped up and down.

In the finals, even their winning design was no match against two second-graders, David Robles and Brandon Martinez-Santiago, who received help from a sixth-grader, Emilio Perez. Arrow-like in shape, their vehicle worked like an exhaust pipe in reverse, funneling air through a paper-towel tube into the plastic bag.

After David and Brandon’s car traveled several feet past the others, Sirico gave the two boys a laminated poster with the five-step design process to hang in their classroom.

After a half-hour of rooting on the wind-powered cars, the students cleared out of the gym to head back to class. Exuberant, they still buzzed with the high that comes from watching a close competition.

“I wish this was a tradition,” one sixth-grader said. Any science-fair coordinator would be envious.