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Last updated on Monday, May 28, 2012
(BROWNSTOWN) - A group of Brownstown Central High School physics students’ recent efforts to walk on water produced mixed results.
"We think ours will work," Allyson Hackman said last Thursday morning at the swimming pool at the Brownstown Park.
Aubrey Woods, of the Tribune reports, Hackman and seven other seniors gathered at the pool along with their physics teacher Kasey Proehl to see if they could walk on water with special shoes they made for a class project.
Hackman and her teammates, Skyler Sitterding, David Philpot and Hunter Carlin, experienced some success with their shoes, as Carlin was able to stand up and move about 15 to 20 feet across the pool.
The other team, comprised of Trey DeHart, Blair Briscoe, Kyle Whistler and foreign exchange student Wilken Wohler, weren't quite as successful.
Proehl said she took the idea for the project from an annual competition at San Diego University.
"This is the first time we've tried it here," said the first-year Brownstown Central teacher.
Each team had to submit three ideas for shoes that could be used to walk on water, she said.
The teams also had to come up with a method of constructing a water shoe that floated, could be stabilized when someone was standing on it and then find a means of propelling themselves the length of the pool.
The teams were graded on the success of their water shoes.
"This is 10 percent of their grade," Proehl said.
If a team could make water shoes that floated they received six points, and if they could successfully walk across the pool they received 10 points.
Hackman and Hunter said coming up with water shoes wasn't
that hard to do.
Their team used duct tape to combine several slabs of foam together. The hardest part was figuring out how to make them so someone could stand up in them.
"We built our shoes into it," Hackman said.
Whistler said the hardest part of the exercise was coming up with a way of staying afloat once a person was standing on the water shoes in the pool.
"We can't propel ours,'' he said. "You have to shuffle your feet, but we can't keep ours together enough to shuffle them."
The other team eventually tied their two water shoes together, which made it easier to propel them, Whistler said.
He said a little advanced testing might have helped make the water shoes work a little better.
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