The Staples Student Spectacular, in which students research and answer a chosen question on how to improve different real-world problems, will take place again this year. Last year was the first year.
“The idea for the Staples Spectacular Student Challenge evolved from the Staples students’ experiences with the Moody’s Mega Math Challenge. Staples students have benefitted from their participation in the Moody’s contest over the years. Mr. Corbo and Mr. Dodig sought to create an experience that more Staples students could be involved in,” said math teacher Trudy Denton, who organizes the event.
In this event, groups are given a 12-hour window of time, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on March 13, to sit in a room and research, analyze, and come up with a proposal to an issue.
The only material they are given is a 10-page packet on the topic, and “COW” computer if needed. They are forbidden from seeking help from teachers or anyone outside their teams.
After they submit their findings at 9 p.m. they are sent to readers from across the Staples faculty to be judged. The top five or six teams then present their projects and answer questions in the week of April 10 in front of a panel of “community experts,” says a flyer regarding the event.
Last year, the challenge was to create a more eco-friendly environment using specific techniques such as local farming, solar power, and changing household electricity consumption. Students were assigned to see which one of these strategies, or a combination, would be most beneficial to Westport.
Out of nine teams, a team consisting of all seniors, Kat Krieger ’10, Annie Harnick ’10, Lena Ziskin ’10, Nick Cion ’10, and Lexa Koenig ’10, won the $10,000 prize (that has been raised to $12,500 this year) in scholarship money.
Students who participated in it last year discussed the challenges of the challenge, and what they plan to work on next year. They said that the quality of the projects rests greatly upon effective time-management and division of labor due to the condensed work period.
“Typically, the first two hours are spent brainstorming ideas and allocating workload to the various members of the group. The next seven or eight hours is usually everyone focusing on his or her piece. The final two or three hours is spent putting it all together,” said Joe April ’11, who participated in the Challenge last year.
The teams got through the long day with constant caffeine and a lot of delivered food.
April also shared that working with other students on a group paper, something most Staples kids haven’t formally done before, was one of the more difficult parts of the Challenge.
“The hardest part was working with other students because it required that everybody be on the same page with one another and know how their part fits into the whole,” April said.
“The last hour was both very exciting and highly stressful because it is very difficult to synthesize the pieces each member of the team was working on for the day.”
Overall, though, the students found this experiencing a rewarding project, and both April and Chenchen Feng ’11 are excited about participating in it again this year.
Feng shared that her favorite part of the challenge was how all of the teams went in different directions and had to back up their own claims.
“I think entire experience was positive. The overwhelming sentiment from the students was that they wanted more experiences like this,” Denton stated on how the students felt about the challenge.
April is predicting that the focus of the project this year will be on the economy, specifically on the creation of jobs. The students will find out on March 13, and soon enough one team will be walking out with $12,500 big ones.
