NH students take first at building competition
PHOTO FROM TWITTER
Nodaway-Holt iBuild advisor Stacy Calfee poses with her eighth grade iBuild team, which took first place at iBuild Showcase in Kansas City earlier this month. Pictured are, from left: Calfee, Rachael Wilmes, Bailey Owens, Raymond Thacker, Jasmine Parker, and Kimberly Clements.
A rookie experience can be intimidating. For five Nodaway-Holt eighth graders, it was just another day at the office.
Competing at their first iBuild Showcase at Bartle Hall in Kansas City May 4, the team of Rachael Wilmes, Bailey Owens, Raymond Thacker, Jasmine Parker, and Kimberly Clements managed to take first prize for the community center they planned. The model they built had to fit into an 11-inch by 17-inch box lid, and the club could not spend more than $5 on materials.
According to club advisor Stacy Calfee, that wasn’t a problem at all.
“Over the years, I have a ton of material in my classroom, and the students brought in some material from home,” Calfee said. “Everything in their model was built to scale, from little sinks in the bathrooms to a balance bar in the dance studio.”
Calfee has advised the iBuild team at Nodaway-Holt for years and this year’s title marks her sixth championship as advisor.
Calfee said she was proud of her students, but also excited for the opportunities they got while at the iBuild Showcase.
“There were tons of activities for everyone to do throughout the day,” Calfee said. “There were also construction companies that came out and talked to the kids about careers in construction.
“Several colleges were also present, including the University of Central Missouri and Pittsburg State University. We got invited to come to their campuses.”
iBuild is sponsored by the National Institute for Construction Excellence and is an invitational-style competition for students from sixth to eighth grades. Each grade level competition has different parameters and is judged on a different rubric.
For the eighth graders, the challenge was to build a community center and park, but the plan had to be meticulous. According to the NICE website, they had go through real-life hoops including doing a feasibility study, determining and “purchasing” a location, going through zoning and city code offices, and creating blueprints.
Calfee said her students were inspired by a need they saw in their district.
“One student asked why there wasn’t a place dedicated specifically for the arts,” Calfee said. “They took the idea and ran with it, and now, their community center was one dedicated to the pursuit of the fine arts.
“They have a lot of rooms in the center, including a dance studio. They used foil for the wall-size mirror and built a balance bar to scale to put in.”
To make matters just a little more complicated, the group decided to build their center and park in Maryville instead of Graham. But Calfee commented how the city of Maryville has always been facilitating in the past, and this year was no exception.
Calfee also noted that the eighth-grade team received a special award for their blueprints.
In addition to the championship-winning eighth grade team, Calfee also took advantage of the opportunity to bring her first team of sixth graders.
The challenge for sixth graders was taking an aspect of their school and “improving the wise use of natural resources” by building a “green” entertainment patio, landscape plan, rain garden addition, or rooftop garden, which also had to fit in an 11-inches by 17-inches box top and cost no more than $5 to put together.
Calfee said her students chose to build a patio on the Maitland campus, and though they didn’t win, they still got “excellent feedback” they would use for the next few years of competition. Something else interesting came out of the project as well.
“We had gotten into a discussion about different rooms, because my room in the elementary school is in the 1953 wing, but their regular classroom is in the 2000 wing,” Calfee said. “One of my students decided, on a whim, to do a research paper about the history of the Maitland school, where he found that the first school was built on this address in 1917.
“He also found out about a tradition wherein the janitor would ring a bell at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., possibly to signify the beginning and the end of the school day. The bell the janitor rang is still on campus, preserved and memorialized.”
This started a new tradition at the school which began with last Tuesday’s brief celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Maitland campus at its current address. All sixth graders rang the bell ceremoniously to start the last day of classes.