The “Wimberley Wonders,”
The “Wimberley Wonders,” a team of five Jacob’s Well Elementary fifth graders, represented the Wimberley Independent School District at the Texas Destination Imagination state tournament held at The University of Texas at Arlington last week.
The Wonders took first place in the Scientific Challenge. Team members Helen Dunham, Liv Hawkins, Clara Buchanan, Ruthie Deringer and Sunday Shelor competed against 22 other elementary teams from across the state, including many 6A districts. They were one of 496 teams and more than 10,000 people attended.
On February 1, in the regional Destination Imagination tournament, the Wonders competed against 17 other teams and took first place in the Sci- entific Challenge. They were also awarded the “Renaissance Award,” which is a special designation given to teams who exhibit exceptional skill in design, engineering and performance and recognizes extraordinary effort and preparation.
The Destination Imagination competition has seven challenge options: scientific, technical, engineering, fine arts, improvisational and service learning.
This year’s Scientific Challenge was called “Worlds Beyond” and the requirements for the eight-minute-long presentation were to create and present a story in which a character, who is located on a planet other than Earth, thinks they are alone but discovers that they are not. They were challenged to include technobabble in the story and to build a device or an effect that demonstrated what their technobabble described.
The team had a $150 spending limit on props, costuming and effects. Teams were encouraged to use garage sale or “trash” items to achieve their solution.
The Wonders chose Pluto as their planet and decided to tell a story, based on real life characters Venitia Burney, an 11 year old girl, and her grandfather, Falconer Madan.
According to Wikipedia, in 1930, “Falconer Madan read the story of a new planet’s discovery and mentioned it to his granddaughter Venetia. She suggested the name Pluto – the Roman god of the Underworld, who was able to make himself invisible. Madan forwarded the suggestion to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled his American colleagues at Lowell Observatory. Clyde Tombaugh liked the proposal because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell, who had predicted the existence of Planet X, which they thought was Pluto because it was coincidentally in that position in space.”
The Wonders used hydraulics, pneumatic systems and density experiments combined with creative rhyming story telling and a theatrical set construction to help convey facts about Pluto to a panel of judges.
They captivated the imagination of the audience as it shot scarves and cotton balls, representing frozen methane, several feet in the air with a pneumatic tube system they integrated into the icy-blue paper mache volcano.
Rachel and Matthew Buchanan, owners of The Leaning Pear restaurant and parents of Clara, said, “We would like to see the program grow in Wimberley and we look forward to hosting an informative “DI Day” meeting sometime in early fall at WISD.”
