Children forge mini trap masterworks in true Home Alone-style
ADAMS TWP — Fearsome furnaces, high-voltage trip wires and tar-slicked stairs all awaited any burglars who tried to rob the miniature rooms on display at Mars Area Elementary School’s gymnasium this Monday.
Different dioramas featured falling trees, TNT crates and electrified chairs as copy-pasted portraits of Harry, Marv or Kevin from the movie “Home Alone“ scramble and scheme. In most of the rooms, something is moving, driven by positional servo motors installed by fourth grade students into their little for fortresses.
The event celebrates the hard work, cleverness and imagination of Mars’ fourth-grade students, all of whom worked together to craft booby traps inspired by the holiday favorite “Home Alone.“ The project worked to teach children about the laws of cause and effect, as it applies to science, but it also fostered other major skills such as collaboration, art design and storytelling.
“Oh, it has been fun,” said fourth-grade teacher Michael Fugh. “The kids have had a blast doing it. They really have.”
“And what you see — 100%, they did everything,” he added. “They brought the stuff, anywhere that they wanted to put anything. The only thing that the teachers really had to do was keep them organized, give them a little bit of guidance, and they did everything else themselves.”
The dioramas work to include simple machines the students learned about in some of the other grades, Fugh said.
“We’re moving into magnets and electricity right after the new year, so this plays right into our electricity unit, which is nice,” he said. “So we’ll be able to touch back, ‘Remember when we made this motor? We actually have motors in our unit that the kids are using, and needed to manipulate and figure out how different circuits and stuff work.”
“There’s Harry,” Fugh said, pointing toward the physical education teacher Brian Fox.
Fox appeared wearing an ashen-colored coat and a black beanie festooned with feathers. He carried a plunger, just like the bumbling baddie Harry, played by actor Joe Pesci, from “Home Alone.”
“Mr. Fox!” Fugh called. “How are you doing today? You look great! Thank you for doing that.”
“It just kind of spiraled into this huge thing,” said Colleen Hinrichsen, who teaches science, technology, engineering, art and math at Mars Elementary. “It started out just as a couple people brainstorming, and then everybody got involved and it was like, ‘We could do lights and motors and coding.’ ... it was just very organic.”
The fourth-grade teacher Sharyn Lipnicky first imagined the idea for the project, but then other ideas came along, Hinrichsen said. She pointed to a background for photo-taking that consisted of Christmas trees, gift boxes and a snow bank — work which the art teacher Katie Frye had contributed.
“But the students haven’t been used to doing a lot of group work,” Hinrichsen said. “That was kind of the cool thing, because in the last few years, everything has been, you know, ‘stay away from each other,’” referring to the isolation growing children weathered throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So it was a lot of learning about listening to each other and compromise,” Hinrichsen said. “But I think once they started building them, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is really amazing.”
The students on one diorama had worked intensively on coding for the servo motor to time the “flame” for the furnace, signaled by a bulb, just right, Hinrichsen said.
Students had to use similar precision for another trap, which deployed an automated Santa Claus decoration to ensnare the burglars, she said. She explained students had to program it for a certain angle for it to move correctly, because if this angle wasn’t correct, the whole trap would tear away from its position in the room.
But there were still certain features to each diorama the students were uniquely prepared for, too, she said. This was the imagination involved in positioning their devices within the “Home Alone“ universe somehow, she said.
“Grown-ups don’t always have the imagination to know everything that is going on,” she said.
“It was a lot of fun,” she added. “But it also just reinforces understanding of a scene, what’s happening in a scene, whether it’s a story or a movie.”
