Eastern Heights students play to win, learn

Eastern Heights students play to win, learn
4/29/2004 2:15 PM

Keahi Kaleiohi, John Earl, Amy Harris and Kayla Anderson are still working to perfect their game, "Teddy Gone Hunting," which won the award for best engineering design at the annual Hasbro TOYchallenge.

Three sixth-graders from Eastern Heights Elementary School recently found out just how much you can learn from playing to win.

The students, Keahi Kaleiohi, Kayla Anderson and John Earl recently received the award for best engineering design at the Hasbro TOYchallenge reginal competition in Raleigh, N.C.

The event brings together students from around the country who have created or designed a toy or game. Submissions are then judged on a variety of criteria, including originality and engineering elegance, which is what grabbed the judges' attention for the Eastern Heights students.

Their game, "Teddy Gone Hunting," is a combination of trivia and bowling. Players roll a ball down a board, trying to hit as many animals (attached to bumpers) as possible. The more animals a ball hits on the way down the board, the closer a player gets toward winning. If the ball hits a "take a card" bumper, the player has an opportunity to earn more points by answering a trivia question about former president Teddy Roosevelt.

With a little help from Amy Harris, an eighth-grade friend from Battle Creek Middle School, the students created the game in response to reading the book "Bully, Teddy Roosevelt" in English class.

"I'm proud of these students," said Donna Yu, the teacher at Eastern Heights who helped them with the project. "They took the initiative to be creative, work on the project on their own time, and enter it into the contest. It is really impressive that these students could work together and create such a great game."

So impressive, in fact, that reporters from KARE-11 News and the Pioneer Press have already visited the school to report on the game's success in the TOYchallenge. But it might not end there, the students say they plan to enter the game in the national TOYchallenge later this year.