Kirk Watkins, Jamestown. On March 4, 2020, the students from Patrick Griffin’s third, fourth and fifth grade class at Jamestown Elementary competed in the KidWind Challenge at the Energy Institute which is an extention of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. According to the KidWind Challenge’s website, https://www.kidwind.org/challenge, “The KidWind Challenge is a hands-on design celebration that engages students through the lens of wind and solar energy. Student teams design, construct and test small scale wind turbines and solar structures at events all over the world.”

When asked how Griffin had heard about the challenge and why he had initially entered the program, he said, “as a part of our energy unit that we were doing at Jamestown Elementary, we heard about this wind turbine competition that they hold every year. It’s a nationwide competition with local competitions first.” He and his students talked about embarking on an educational journey into this current pressing issue.

The class had been preparing for the competition for about two months prior to the competition. “Our energy unit started just before the holidays, with us really getting started in January with wind energy and the KidWind project,” he explained. “We signed up to participate in December, and we purchased the wind turbine kits and the kids started working in class with them in early January. 

“They decided as a group that they would actually work after school, and that they would create their own wind-turbine for the competition,” said Griffin as he described his classes commitment to the effort, “so they were cutting up PVC pipe and gluing it together, testing out our own design. That went fairly well, although we realized that we were going to need a hybrid solution from the kit, and from what we did on our own design, and put that together for the actual competition.” 

Griffin’s class worked on different projects while learning the concepts regarding wind energy, including blade angles, blade numbers, materials, and different wind angles in the weeks leading up to the challenge. They met every Wednesday after school and fine-tuned their most efficient concepts, working in teams to understand and create the most efficient and powerful wind turbine models. 

“We spent the most time on wind blade design, running tests at the school on blade surface area, number of blades, blade angle, blade material, and blade shape,” Griffin said as he explained the testing process, “we picked the overall blade design with the highest energy output from our tests, then refined the number of blades to three based on the gear ratio of 8 to 1 that we chose (we had limited number of gears to try).”

 “I asked the kids. I said, ‘do you want to join in on this competition?’ They agreed, they said yes, absolutely, let’s do it. And so today is the day that we’re actually running the tests on our turbines, and we are also testing our knowledge.”

On the morning of March 4, the students loaded up into two vehicles and made the trek to Colorado State University in Fort Collins. On its Facebook page, The Energy Institute states, “We employ science to understand pressing energy challenges and mobilize diverse teams to find solutions. By collaborating with multinational corporations, small startup companies, non-profits and governmental entities our research-based solutions make a quantifiable impact. Again, and again, we’ve demonstrated that this approach brings about real, measurable change in the global energy landscape.

 In this instance, the collaboration was with children that could be the future leaders and innovators in the field of energy production and development. Competing in the challenge were fourteen teams from around Northern Colorado. Jamestown’s team seemed to be at a disadvantage, as they were comprised of third through fifth grade students and were competing against teams made up of fourth through eighth grade students. 

“The kids understand that,” explained Griffin, “but with that, the kids are pretty competitive, and so even on the way here, some of the kids were quizzing each other on wind turbine knowledge, so they probably have high expectations for themselves.” 

Part of the competition included different challenges. “We are also testing our knowledge in a couple of different ways,” Griffin said, “with the judges asking us questions, and with the kids creating some off-the-cuff, ready-made…a wind generated sail car, and a wind generated turbine to test their knowledge.” 

The first event was testing the turbine that the team had spent the previous two months creating, testing and fine-tuning during their Wednesday after-school sessions. The testing would be done in a wind tunnel.

Griffin went on to explain the challenge and the process that they had used to develop their final model. “The wind tunnel is a 4 foot by 4 foot “box style” fan setup with 4 fans that pulls air through the tunnel. The glass tunnel is used to keep consistent air flow from test to test and is used at all KidWind Challenge events. We did our best to set up something similar at the school. The judges were measuring energy output of the provided electric generator. All teams used the same generator, so the objective was to refine your wind turbine using your knowledge of turbine design. This mainly included wind blade design and gear design.” 

They finished second in this competition, with a total outcome of fourteen Joules of energy. This placed the team second behind a high school team that would eventually win the competition.

For the next two events, aptly titled the “MacGyver Challenges,” Griffin’s team, otherwise known as the Jamestown Elementary Turbine Tamers, were ready to show what they could do. The challenges were to create a wind crane to lift an increasing amount of steel washers. The second challenge was to build a sail car, with the sail car that travelled the farthest being declared the winner. According to Griffin, both would be built using materials supplied on the MacGyver table, i.e. paper plates, cardboard, string, rubber bands small wheels straws, etc…They would test their design, and after making necessary modifications would be able to retest their upgraded designs. The challenges were designed to give the competitors examples of how the technical knowledge they had learned could be used in real-world applications. Using this platform, the Energy Institute can serve to inspire future researchers into different fields of energy research.

According to Jason Quinn, an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University, and the organizer for this branch of the competition stated, “this is coupled with the Eco-car program which is funded by GM and the Department of Energy, combined with NREL funding which comes in to support this particular assessment center that focuses on wind, and so this is an outreach event where all the Eco-car kids volunteer to be a part of the program and help support it.”

For the final stage, the team sat down with some of the Eco-car students, who were the judges for this event. As a group, they answered the judge’s questions about strategy, conceptual knowledge, and documentation of their process. As they confidently answered questions and showed their grasp of knowledge that they had learned over the course of the previous two months, the judges, Griffin and other parents were visibly impressed and seemed moved by the competence and poise that the Turbine Tamers showed.

Kyle Otte, one of the volunteer drivers and the parent of a competitor, Aslyn Otte, a fourth-grade student at Jamestown Elementary, summed up his view of the competition. 

“(It’s) awesome, creative, a lot of outside of the box thinking, trial and error, trying to make things work,” said Otte, as he was able to witness his daughter and her team at the competition. “She’s a very mechanical-thinking person so this is very much in her wheelhouse.” 

A mechanic by trade, Kyle appreciated the access that the competition offered for the students. “Whether it’s a path she chooses, or not, it’s really good educational experience, to show the alternate side of some of the academics, where you physically can turn some of the book-learning into mechanical function.”

He was also quick to point out the unique benefits that Jamestown Elementary offered to its families that many schools wouldn’t have. “One of the benefits of the way that Jamestown works is that there are a lot of opportunities that aren’t as prevalent or accessible in other schools. One of things that makes this really accessible to the kids is that they have the opportunity to sign up, the school district doesn’t have to do too much, and the parents’ step in to cover whatever they have to cover, and we showed up.”

 They did show up and made a strong statement. When the final standings were announced, the Turbine Tamers placed fourth out of fourteen teams. The Jamestown Elementary team of ten’s placement was not only impressive but also lays the groundwork for students to build on in future competitions. 

(Originally published in the March 19, 2020, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)