Walt Whitman junior Karl Benz from Potomac was part of a four-person team that won first place for Best Design for their "Atmospheric Tennis Ball Probe" in a competition at the Governor’s Institute of Vermont and the University of Vermont’s Engineering Summer Institute from July 1-7.
This camp included 114 high school students, 97 from the U.S. and 17 from other countries including Scotland, China, Korea, India, Honduras and Indonesia.
"[Once the competition started] they basically gave you the project, gave you the materials and let you do what you wanted with most of your time. … It was very fun; there were a lot of good speakers," said Benz.
During the first three days of the camp students listened to various speakers including U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.); John Cohn, an Engineer at IBM and Madeleine Kunin, former Governor of Vermont. Many of these speakers encouraged students to actively use engineering thought to find creative solutions to real human problems.
"On the second night they had some really cool guy come in to talk about electricity, he had a pickle shooter. … He made the pickle glow and also dented the wall with the pickle shooter," said Benz.
Other activities included an air cannon demonstration, a "Sand Arches" competition to and the infamous "condiments duel," where campers hurled various items such as ketchup, chocolate syrup and whipped cream at each other as a way to break the ice.
"They figured once you squirt ketchup all over somebody you’re more likely to go up and talk to them," Benz’s mother Lynne said. "So it was like an icebreaker. … The pictures were hilarious."
The young engineers also got the chance to tour companies such as IBM and General Dynamics.
"The main point of the camp was that you can make a difference," said Benz. "It was really fun. … I thought it was going to be all nerdy kids, but there was a variety of kids there."
On the third day of the camp, the campers split into teams for the competition portion. These teams competed against each other in different sections according to the interest of the engineer. These divisions included aeronautical engineering, biomass, robotics, wind energy and the Vermont Challenge, the latter of which asked the students to look at solutions for issues confronting the state of Vermont. Benz and his team were in the Aeronautical section of the competition.
"It didn’t seem fun to me to do robotics and write programs," said Benz. "It seemed more fun to shoot stuff out of a cannon."
Each section was given its own objective; the point of the aeronautical division was to design a space probe and try to get it to stay in the air the longest. Benz and his three teammates ended up designing the "Atmospheric Tennis Ball Probe," which stayed in the air for 47 seconds, breaking the previous camp record of 27 seconds.
"We sat down an hour beforehand and thought about it," said Benz. "Everybody else had already gone and started making their stuff; we just thought about it longer and somehow came up with the idea of the tennis ball probe."
"The theme of the program is to learn about how to think, how to reason and use the power of knowledge," said Dawn Densmore, director the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Science.
Along with his engineering accomplishments Benz also rows crew for Whitman in the fall and spring, and participates on Whitman’s swim team in the winter. This summer, Benz swam for the River Falls swim team, and he is currently participating in a 10-day bike ride across Iowa.