SANTA ANA : Invention Is Mother of Education

With her love of geography and inventing, Vicenta Ortiz, 9, thought it was only natural to build an electronic game that tests a person’s knowledge of the world.

Along with a couple of her friends from George Washington Carver Elementary School, Vicenta helped design a trivia game, which lights up a small bulb when a player answers a question correctly.

“It’s fun to do things with science. We can help people learn about geography,” she said.

Her exhibit was one of dozens on display during a daylong science showcase held at Carver Elementary on Wednesday. More than 800 students participated in the day’s events, showing off exhibits and describing how they tested various hypotheses through experimentation.

Throughout the school, teachers, parents and other visitors heard students tell about their investigations into areas of science, including physics, magnetism, botany, electricity and biology.

Teachers praised the science showcase as a way to foster a love of learning in students, and a way to get them thinking about solving problems.

“It gives them self-esteem so they know they can say, ‘Gosh, I can be anything, an engineer, I can be a scientist,”’ said Patty Forbath, who teaches a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class.

In Forbath’s classroom, students demonstrated several inventions they made to improve the quality of life at school for students. Inventions included the simple electronic geography game and a kind of table hockey set with stick game pieces that can be moved from below with magnets attached to sticks.

One group of students created an alarm designed to thwart would-be crayon thieves. Using aluminum foil, D-sized batteries, copper wire and a tape recorder, the children rigged a simple circuit that would activate the alarm when a crayon was removed. When triggered, the micro-cassette recorder played a snippet of tape that said: “Stop thief! Is that your crayon?!”

Another group created a message delivery system called “Jet Mail,” designed to pass notes during class. The device consisted of a propeller-driven foam block that traversed the room on a string.

Demonstrating the contraption, Daisy Ramirez, 10, of Santa Ana, wound up the rubber band that powered the propeller, attached a note, and released the block. With a barely audible whir, the device slid down the length of string and came to a stop at the far end.

“We didn’t have permission to stand up and gossip with our friends, so we invented Jet Mail,” Ramirez explained.