PANAMA CITY — Last summer’s damaging heavy rains and flooding have a silver lining as a learning opportunity for a group of local children.
When the Fellowship of the Brick, a local First Lego League (FLL) team, an international program that aims to get kids interested in science and technology, found out this year’s project required them to come up with a solution to a natural disaster, a teammate’s recent personal experience with flooding helped them decide which disaster to focus on.
“Our teammate Connor [Woodrum] had had a problem with flooding so we thought, ‘Hey, this damaged somebody, we might as well use that in our project,’ ” said Logan Bernatt, 13, a member of the Fellowship.
Logan said the flooding had caused $43,000 in damage to the Woodrums’ home.
“We thought that was pretty serious,” he said
The group, consisting of eight girls and boys under the age of 14, spent the last few months doing “a lot of research” into flooding and how to address it.
“Not everyone has hurricanes, not everyone has volcanoes, but, in the U.S., they found out that flooding is the number one disaster for property and safety,” said Mike Bernatt, the team’s coach.
The project they designed, called the aqua garden network, consists of two gardens, one on higher ground than the other, connected by an underground pipe placed so that the opening under the high garden is lower than the opening under the low garden, allowing water to be redistributed from the low-lying area, explained Logan and teammate Alex Johnson, 11. The team also planned to plant water-absorbing plants like the blue flag iris in the gardens.
This project is different because FLL teams do not usually build full-scale working models of their projects.
“We kept getting marks [from FLL officials] that said, ‘Hey, you got a great idea there, but we don’t think it can be implemented,’” said Bernatt, who went to the Science and Discovery Center for help in proving the project’s usefulness.
The center donated land for the team to build an aqua garden, while GAC Contractors donated rock and gravel and Kevin Julian, owner of Storm Shelters of Northwest Florida, agreed to bring his backhoe to dig the hole and move the rocks and gravel.
“They called and asked and I said sure,” Julian said. “You gotta give back a little.”
Other than this help, the children did most of the project themselves and understand its workings as well as, if not better than, their coach.
“It is actually very fun building this,” Alex said.
Connor said his mother will “most likely” let him build an aqua garden network in her backyard.
“It’s not going to stop an epic catastrophe flood, but it will definitely help lessen the effects and damage,” he said.
The team will take the project to the regional FLL competition, where they will be graded in three categories.
“One is the engineering portion where they build a robot that is tested versus obstacles and they get points toward those obstacles,” Bernatt said. “The other one is core values, do they learn gracious professionalism, honesty, those type of things. And then the third portion is this project.”
The team hopes the project will earn them a bid to the state competition.