Kids’ Invention Rocks and Scoops
Necessity being the mother of invention, is it any wonder the Pooper Scooper Plow 2000 was born at Birch Lane Elementary School — conceived by a group of students, no less?
The school sits near John J. Burns Park, an expanse of playing fields that is a favorite destination of geese on the South Shore.
The geese seem to favor Birch Lane’s fields as an auxiliary grazing area, so in addition to the three R’s, Birch Lane students are left pondering a fourth: Removin’. As in, how to remove the estimated 70,000 pounds of droppings left each year by the growing gaggle of geese on school grasslands.
“Every time we’d go outside for recess or gym, the field was covered with goose poop, and we’d track it all through school and it would even get into our stuff,� said Arielle Dhaim, 12, a sixth grader. She and three friends were assigned in October by their science teacher, Brian Mulcahy, to create a solution for a local problem.
They chose the geese, and their science project became a large receptacle on wheels that is pushed along the field to skim the ground and scoop the droppings into a plastic bag.
It was entered in February in the Christopher Columbus Awards, a nationwide competition for students’ innovations addressing local problems.
In early May, it was chosen out of hundreds of entries, making Team Pooper Scooper one of eight finalists nationwide to compete for a $25,000 grant toward fully developing an invention.
Photo by Kirk Condyles.
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