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The silly string launching machine: How Gorham middle schoolers are having fun with engineering

The school partnered with Southern Maine Community College to teach students how to build computer networks that remotely control machines, with a hilarious result.

GORHAM, Maine — Kids at Gorham Middle School have been learning how to code and build small machines that launch silly string and on Friday morning, their efforts finally paid off.

The school partnered with Southern Maine Community College to teach students how to build computer networks that can remotely control machines, which the kids also wired and assembled themselves.

As a reward, the students got to use their new silly string contraptions on their teachers. Principal Quinton Donahue said these are the lessons that will stick with the students for years to come.

"Right now, especially when they're in middle school, it's all about exploration," he said. "So, we want them to be exploring, trying, doing all sorts of different things, and maybe this sparks something in their mind."

Paul Richardson, an SMCC engineering and computer design professor who led the lesson, said the same skills could be applied to a wide variety of practical uses in the children's future.

"The big picture idea here is that they understand, in the end, how to send data over a network," Richardson said. "So, use one machine to drive another machine. And it's not all [that] different from protocols we use for smart houses [or] remote surgery."

As the two schools worked out future projects, Donahue said the next one would likely be building weather stations together.

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