Corte Madera game girls go to Sally Ride Toy Challenge finals

Five girls at Portola Valley's Corte Madera School responded to an out-of-the-ordinary challenge: Create an educational game and enter it in astronaut Sally Ride's Science Toy Challenge.

Their invention, a board game called "Around the World in 51 Steps," was chosen as a finalist in the national competition, which will be held Saturday, April 29, in the San Diego Aerospace Museum."

Working as a team since last November, sixth-graders Anna Benham, Liza Bock, Claire Junglieb and Laura Gibbs and fifth-grader Diana Acquesta decided to create an academic game based on science facts. After brainstorming ideas, they designed the game and made the model during lunch-time meetings of the school's Science and Art Club, known as SART.

Cheering them on was science teacher Treena Joi. She had announced the challenge at an all-school assembly, inviting students at the grade 4-8 grade school to participate.

The contest is designed to give kids, especially girls, a chance to develop their engineering and design skills by creating their dream toy.

Ms. Joi's science classroom became the team headquarters, and the girls also worked on their own time at home. "We modeled the game's title after the book (and) movie 'Around the World in 80 Days,'" says Anna.

Claire and Liza covered the game board, which has all the continents on it, marked with 51 steps.

Diana came up with the idea of creating markers — those miniature objects that show where players are on the board — that can double as dice.

Five can play the game, advancing from one continent to the next by correctly answering science questions drawn from four piles of cards. With a wrong answer, the player moves back a number of steps.

The girls wrote questions of varying difficulty, based on what they've learned in science classes linked to the California Science Content Standards for fourth through sixth grade.

Here are examples of questions:

• True or false: The original landmass was called Pangaea. (True)

• In what period did mammoths live? A. Second period B. Ice Age C. Neither (B)

Besides creating a game that's fun and challenging to play, the girls say they learned a lot. "It's been a great opportunity to move on," says Claire. "If we win and the game is marketed, each of us will get 1 percent of the profit."

Laura says she learned to commit her time to a project and cooperate as a team member.

"I learned the importance of teamwork," says Liza. "Unless everyone pitched in, we wouldn't have been able to go to the nationals."