By OLIVIA BERGMEIER
Lead Reporter - Salina Post
Dozens of students, four large wind tunnels and hand-built turbines filled The Temple in downtown Salina on Saturday, April 13, for the 2024 Kansas KidWind State Finals. Last week, four Kansas teams traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the 2024 World KidWind Challenge.
KidWind is a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics- or STEM-focused program where students from across the country participate, focusing on renewable energy and bringing the engineering behind fields of turbines to the classroom.
Kurt Foley, an energy specialist at the Kansas Energy Program, which is housed under the Kansas State University Engineering Extension, helps with the Kansas KidWind Challenge each year.
"It's just giving the students a hands-on project. It's something that I've always preferred, getting to work with my hands," Foley said. "[It gives students] life experience out of it — getting to challenge yourself and to grow as a learner and as a person."
The renewable energy-focused challenges begin at each school, with a $7 KidWind generator and various materials for students to create turbines.
Each team participates in regional championships that push the top two teams in each division to the state-wide challenge.
Students then design and engineer these turbines and perform various challenges, including knowledge tests, putting the student-made turbines into a wind tunnel to test how much power they generate and an instant challenge designed to flex the students' problem-solving skills.
Foley said that students often become incredibly creative with their turbine designs or only focus on maximizing the energy produced by the turbine with a simple design.
"We have wind tunnels that we bring to the competitions, and we also loan them out to schools so they can test their designs before coming to a competition," Foley said.
The Temple was a new stage for the Kansas KidWind Challenge, allowing western Kansas teams to travel a shorter distance than to its previous venue in Topeka.
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There, 25 teams from 15 Kansas KidWind teams faced off to advance to the World KidWind Challenge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Four teams in two divisions topped the charts and headed north for the challenge.
Kansas KidWind Challenge has two age divisions — one for fourth through eighth-grade students and another for ninth through 12th-grade students.
Beloit Breeze visits the world stage
Christie Fouts, the KidWind Coach for Beloit Jr/Sr High School, said she brought KidWind to Beloit's schools in 2018 and enjoys assisting students in the hands-on program.
This year, one of her teams, the Beloit Breeze, competed in the fourth through eighth grade age division and placed second, prompting the team to the KidWind World competition stage.
KidWind World Challenge sees competitors from across the country and further beyond U.S. borders, with teams from Mexico, The Phillipines
Fouts said that although the state competitions are intense, they only intensify at the World Challenge, and that's what the Beloit Breeze experienced in Minneapolis.
"It's a super competitive competition, and you really have to do extremely well in every single event if you want to be competitive in the top two," Fouts said. "They [The Beloit Breeze] felt good about all their instant challenges and their judging and quiz bowl, but we don't have results yet for those. They were most happy with their fast tunnel."
Judges provide three different wind tunnels at the challenge — a slow, a turning-style and a fast tunnel.
The turning style tests the turbines' ability to yaw from side to side with the wind and stay facing into the wind like large turbines do in the field.
Although Beloit Breeze did not win at the World Challenge, Fouts said the students felt incredibly proud of their performance and can't wait to apply their experiences to next year's competitions.
"It was all about problem-solving, collaborating and all those skills that they need," Fouts said. "Not everything goes the way you want it to when you get there, so there's a lot of thinking on the spot."
"My students had to make changes at the actual event multiple times just to try to adjust to the tunnels there, and they were happy with their results."
The results from the KidWind World Challenge have yet to reach Beloit's mailbox, but Fouts said she and the team eagerly await the results.