A “creativity convention”

A team of kids from St. Paul Catholic School in Fenton has come up with a plan to bring fun back to the riverfront in downtown St. Louis. 

The five members call themselves the Genius in a Bottle team. They want to see a Water Adventure Park built along the Mississippi river. 

Their plan includes an underwater roller coaster, a chance for humans to swim with water  creatures and a Scramble thrill ride. 

Their idea was picked as one of the three best during a recent Academic Challenge Cup creativity competition. There were teams of second and third graders from 34 St. Louis-area schools involved.

Eight-year-old Kelsea Chumley said she likes the underwater roller coaster idea because “you’d be able to see the animals swimming when the ride went underwater.” She added, “And, you could see the people also if they were swimming too.”

Eight-year-old Rachel Greer said humans would be able to swim with whales, dolphins and sharks. When asked about swimming with sharks, she said, “They’d be small, tame sharks.” 

Nine-year-old Kenny Siebert said the roller coaster wouldn’t be under water all the time. “It would be above ground and then duck under the water part of the time,” he said. That would be like the Captain Nemo submarine ride at Disneyland in Florida. 

Asked to describe the Scramble ride, eight-year-old Amy Kohlberg said it would go around real fast “and pretty much make you dizzy.” 

 The kids also thought about cost of running their park. 

Nine-year-old Heather Brocksmith said they’d want to keep admission prices low. She said kids under four would be free, from five to 18, $5, and adults would be $7. 

In the competition, the five-member teams were asked to “create a riverfront attraction that would make our city a ‘must-see’ for families.” They had to first think of a plan, then build a model and finally make a marketing plan. They ended the day by presenting their plans to members of the other teams. 

Adult judges scored all parts of the competition. 

The other two teams given “Teams of Excellence” gold medals were the Brainy Bunch of Oak Brook School in Ballwin and The Creative Invention Convention team from Conway School in Ladue. 

The “creative convention” is just one of the spring events that make up the Academic Challenge Cup. Also included are math competitions for third through eighth graders and language contests for fourth through eighth graders. 

In all, 1,425 students from 66 different schools took part. The events are sponsored by the Gifted Resource Council (GRC). That group has been providing unusual learning experiences in the St. Louis area for the last 17 years. 

(For more information about other GRC events, see the sidebar below.) 

Some of the schools taking part in the “creative convention” work on developing their teams all during the school year. For instance, Our Lakes of Good Counsel School in Bellefountaine Neighbors already has recruited kids for next year’s teams.

Arline Mickrent is the resource teacher at the school. She said, “We use kids who were on this year’s teams to help us with the new kids.” This year, the school entered three creative teams. They also had two teams in both the math and language competitions. 

Some of this year’s creative teams also put a lot of effort in their team names and their costumes. One of the winners in the “most creative” name category was the Stinking Thinking Boys from the Shenandoah Valley School in Chesterfield. 

Nine-year-old Matt Dai said, “We brainstormed the name. We started with the name Stinking Thinking.”

But, nine-year-old Lucas Klein added, “Because we were all boys, we changed it to Stinking Thinking Boys.” 

To make themselves stand out even more, they also made hats to wear. The hats included a figure of a skunk, complete with black bodies and the white stripe. However, they didn’t add any skunk odor.