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Montco train competition reaching end of line

ROYERSFORD A friendly competition between seventh-grade students in the Spring-Ford Area School District and sixth graders at North Wales Elementary School in the North Penn School District is expected to culminate March 30.

ROYERSFORD A friendly competition between seventh-grade students in the Spring-Ford Area School District and sixth graders at North Wales Elementary School in the North Penn School District is expected to culminate March 30.

Starting at 11 a.m., the students from both districts will wind up the fourth annual Maglev Train competition with a Skype session.

Maglev - short for magnetic levitation - is a generic term for any transportation system in which vehicles are suspended and guided by magnetic forces. The teams of six to eight students each researched, designed, drew, and built their own magnetic levitation trains. The trains had to weigh more than 0.7 ounces, and the students had to design a travel route starting in New York and ending in San Francisco.

Each student had a responsibility for a certain part of the project, such as project manager, research planner, design planner, map/route planner, presentation planner, building planner, and testing and redesign coordinator.

"This project will help to increase student understanding of their technology education class, while making a real-world connection to cutting-edge technology that is being developed," Spring-Ford said in a statement. During the Skype session, the students will discuss how they built the trains and other details of the project. - Inquirer staff