Riley DeRosa ’18 at the rock climbing event.
Photo Credit: Sharon Mistretta

The IHA Applied Engineering Club is participated in Imagination Destination, on March 12 in Basking Ridge, NJ. The club, moderated by Mrs. Mistretta, competed in two events at the competition.

The Meme Event required the girls to invent a meaningful meme, develop a metaphor for that meme, and film a related video. Marissa Amen ’18, Riley DeRosa ’18, Hannah Gunning ’19, Kristen Kjetsaa ’18, Emily Koehne ’18, and Eilis McLaughlin ’18 make up the Meme Event team.

The girls came up with a meme about women helping women advance in STEM careers. Their metaphor of a career path is a rock wall. Mrs. Mistretta says, “The career ‘ladder’ has been replaced by a career ‘rock wall’ to navigate a path to success.”

The “handholds” for climbing are being printed from the school’s 3D printers in certain designs, such as a hammer. The team designed their own “handholds” with TinkerCad design software and MakerBot Integrated Development environments. The “handholds” attached to a small presentation board at the competition.

To produce their video, the team went to a rock climbing facility “The Gravity Vault” on Feb. 27 and filmed the girls encouraging each other to climb the rock walls.

The second event, Musical Mashup, challenged its participants to design and build a creative instrument and perform a musical solo and skit with that instrument. Furthermore, the instrument was tested to see how much weight it can hold.

Elizabeth Becz ’18, Kaitlyn Brown ’19, Rebecca Coronel ’16, Sofia Hanson ’18, Olivia Najaar ’19, and Alexa Trubiano ’19 will compete in this event.

The team’s instrument is a cross between a flute and a harp. They have coined it as a “flarp.” Made of balsa wood, non-latex rubber bands, and wax paper, the instrument is handheld size. It consists of a hollow, square barrel with holes as the flute part. The harp is created by placing strings between wood planks protruding from the barrel.  The girls performed a silent skit with an emphasis on facial expression to tell a story about their flarp. This idea is based on a percussion play called “Stomp.” Becz performed a solo on the flarp, and Brown and Coronel performed a duet on their violins during the skit.

The competition has certainly been a learning experience for all the girls involved. Mrs. Mistretta says, “Through creativity and engineering, the girls have learned new skills in creativity, construction and collaboration.”

Stay tuned for the results of the competition.

By Kaitlyn Brown ’19, Staff Writer