Gourds, go lengthy: Ridgedale Elementary levels annual pumpkin drop

What’s that?

You suppose you is perhaps out there for an adept engineer or sharp payload specialist … say, 15 years from now?

Properly, don’t exit of your gourd.

Simply give Melissa Livengood a name prematurely.

The trainer at Ridgedale Elementary College is aware of a roomful of burgeoning ones.

They’re the third-graders in her class on the faculty on Goshen Highway.

You understand: Those who soared after hitting the bottom (comparatively) intact Friday morning within the faculty parking zone.

Or reasonably, the pumpkin they specifically packed, did.

The event was Ridgedale’s annual Pumpkin Drop. Every class within the Ok-5 faculty obtained an opportunity.

Parameters have been as simple, as they weren’t.

College students have been tasked with configuring an array of supplies – pillows, Styrofoam and the like – to enter a cardboard field filled with a pumpkin.

Properly, test that. It wasn’t a “field” on this crisp morning.

It was a “Pumpkin Safety System.”

The concept, mentioned Sheri Pettite, Ridgedale’s principal, was to get the gourds to defy gravity, simply sufficient, to not splat completely, as soon as they hit the parking zone.

Fifth-graders needed to go along with a 100-foot drop from the basket of a crane, Pettite mentioned. It was 90 toes for everybody else.

Pettite, with all the protection measures in place within the basket, personally ship the gourds going from excessive above the proceedings.

“I’m not afraid of heights,” she mentioned.

Capital Metropolis Crane offered each the crane and its operators Vance and Floyd, the principal mentioned.

The duo labored the crane and schooled the scholars on all of the profession technical alternatives on the market, the principal added.

“So we had that element and all of the STEM features of the pumpkin drop,” Pettite mentioned, referring to the science, know-how, engineering and math required for the lesson plan that got here customary with oohs and aahs, and cheers and groans.

As she mentioned, it takes plenty of STEM to maintain a full pumpkin – from turning into pumpkin pie-filling on the finish.

“Our children have been STEM engineers for the train. They labored in groups. They collaborated.”

The payoff: Ms. Livengood’s gourd-warriors walked away with Ridgedale’s coveted Golden Pumpkin Award.

“Bragging rights,” the principal mentioned. “For the remainder of the college yr.”