The Shoe Fits : Students Invent Pump With Changing Heels

Angie Navarro never expected science class at Tracy High School to be fun. And she certainly never imagined that it would lead to national recognition for herself and two classmates.

In their science class at the high school in Cerritos, Navarro, Lisa Corral and LaJoi Stephens, all 18, dreamed up a woman’s shoe that can be converted from a high heel to a low-heeled pump. Earlier this year, the shoe was deemed the nation’s best 12th-grade invention in a national contest sponsored by the publishers of the Weekly Reader, the venerable classroom newspaper.

“We were in shock all day,” Navarro recalled.

Her surprise was understandable. Tracy students do not take winning for granted. Tracy is a continuation high school for youngsters who have failed in conventional schools because of chronic truancy or other academic and personal problems. Yet the Tracy team won in competition with students from conventional schools, not special ones.

May Patent Project

In addition to the $250 savings bond each received, the three are exploring the possibility of patenting their prize-winning project. So far, they have been discouraged by the high cost of hiring a patent attorney. As recently as last week, they were still searching for someone to represent them and their idea, and they are still hopeful. Los Angeles manufacturer Sidney Schwartz, whose Vogue Shoe firm produces 1 million pairs of women’s shoes each year, said he thinks the world may be ready for the convertible pump. “There might be interest in such an invention, especially now that shoes are so expensive,” he said.

According to science teacher Betty DeWolf, winning a national award has given a tremendous boost to the girls’ self-confidence and self-esteem, and indeed to the whole school.

When Navarro graduated from Tracy in June, her accomplishments were singled out in one of the commencement speeches. She was also given a small college scholarship by the ABC Unified School District Teachers Assn. Both Navarro and Corral, who expects to graduate from Tracy this summer, plan to go to Cerritos College in the fall. Stephens, who dropped out of school before the shoe project won the national award, is back in school. She hopes to graduate from Tracy in February, then attend a business school and eventually a four-year college.

“I felt important,” said Corral, recalling her pride when news of the girls’ success was broadcast over the school’s public address system. “It was exciting to win something through school,” Stephens said. To Navarro’s pleasure and amazement, the mayor of Hawaiian Gardens, where she lives, telephoned to congratulate her.

The young women had no idea that their project would be a winner. Navarro explained that they were sitting in science class, desperately trying to come up with an original idea. “We thought everything is already invented,” Navarro said. “We thought we couldn’t invent anything. But it was the last five minutes of class, and we knew we wouldn’t get any credit.”

Just then, a friend teetered wearily by on three-inch heels. What if you could unscrew your high heels and replace them with low ones, and vice versa? the three students wondered.

“We have this idea, but it’s so dumb,” they told DeWolf, who didn’t think it was dumb at all.

“We weren’t too serious about it,” Corral confessed. “We just did it to get it over with because she kept pushing us.”

The real test of the students’ ingenuity came after they had won. Contest officials asked them to provide a working model of their convertible pump for an exhibit of the winning inventions in Washington.

‘Hands-On Experience’

Building a prototype was not easy, but the team had DeWolf behind them. DeWolf, who was recently honored by the California Department of Education as one of the three top science teachers in the state, believes that “science involves hands-on experience and real problems.” Instead of sending her students into the laboratory to verify what they have read in a textbook, DeWolf teaches science as a problem-solving process that begins with careful observation and proceeds to testing various possible solutions by trial and error.

The students’ laboratory was the Swan Shop, a shoe repair shop in Cerritos run by Bong Kim. Navarro talked her sister into lending her a pair of high-heeled, high-fashion black leather pumps. Stephens had left school, but Navarro and Corral went day after day to the shoe shop and tried to find a practical way to affix a low heel to the body of their high-heeled shoe.

Navarro said that Kim, who has helped the school with other projects, thought that what the students wanted to do was impossible. “He just doesn’t think we can do it because we are girls,” Navarro and Corral whispered to each other. But their teacher kept them pumped up. “She told us, ‘You can do it anyway you want. You don’t have to do what he says,’ ” Navarro said.

Finally, they found a screw that attached a low heel firmly to the body of the shoe, put the inner sole back, and, voila , a convertible pump was born.

Neither Navarro nor Corral was a fan of science at first. Corral got a D in the subject when she took it at her previous school. She especially disliked the emphasis on the textbook in conventional science courses. “There are things in there that are boring,” she said. “There are sentences in there you just don’t want to read.”

In DeWolf’s class, the lab is more than a place to verify what students learn from textbooks. It is a place of discovery.

“It’s more exciting,” Corral said of DeWolf’s approach. “You find out more.”

Tracy Principal George Hershey agreed. “For our kids, ‘read the chapter, answer the questions’ is just a killer,” he said. “They’ve failed at that. That’s why they are here.”

The single most important outcome of the experience, in DeWolf’s view, is that the three students have learned problem-solving skills that they will be able to use for the rest of their lives.

Corral, who has an infant daughter, said she applies the principles of problem-solving she learned in class to problems that sometimes arise in school, in raising the baby and in her relationship with her boyfriend. “You think about it for a while, you find the best solution, and then you try it,” she said. “And if it doesn’t work, you try again.”