AVS Fifth Grade Teams Demonstrate Innovation at San Jose Tech Challenge

Alta Vista School’s two 5th-grade teams delivered an outstanding showcase of innovation and creativity in our first San Jose Tech Challenge! The Tech Challenge, sponsored by The Tech Interactive (formerly the San Jose Tech Museum), has been presenting real-world engineering challenges to students in grades 4 through 12 for 39 years. The device showcase is a massive event held at the San Jose Convention Center, featuring over 400 presenting teams. Our group consisted of ten fifth graders: Elijah, Rahi, Dilan, Muhaned, Andrew, Connor, Alexander, Fin, Gil, and Madelynn.

This year’s real-world challenge revolved around how to effectively move and place housing modules. Recognizing that homes can be more economically feasible and quicker to complete when built offsite and transported to a location, students were tasked with creating prototype devices that could be scaled up for use as moving apparatuses. The teams built rotating cranes with puppeting strings out of spare parts, cardboard, a tremendous amount of duct tape, and creative flair pieces like miniature operators and drawings.

Students worked in after-school sessions once or twice a week between February and April to design, build, test, and iterate on their devices. While they presented as two distinct teams, there was a wealth of cross-team learning and idea-sharing. Despite several rounds of redesigns—some requiring them to start almost completely over—both teams successfully completed the challenge when they demonstrated their devices at the showcase event a few weeks ago.

In addition to demonstrating their devices, each team created an Engineering Notebook documenting their process and sat for an interview before a panel of professional engineers. They received team t-shirts and buttons commemorating some of their strongest accomplishments, such as teamwork, persistence, and effectiveness. News of their fun, successful, and rewarding experience quickly spread, and the teams were invited to share their journey at an AVS community meeting. They brought their strong team spirit, creativity, talent, and grace to that presentation, putting on an excellent showing there, too!