Students at LaSalle Springs Middle School will see a playground they designed built in Wildwood’s Route 66 Roadside Park.
The playground will be constructed at the park, 16910 Manchester Road, near the southeast corner of Manchester Road and Grover Crossing Way. Wildwood officials said the park is scheduled to open in 2024.
Ten students worked to design the playground as a project in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teacher Cheryl Rock’s class, and their design was one of 10 entries the city received for its student design competition, according to Wildwood officials.
“It’s great to be able to have that to show to my future classes that this is something you can do,” said Rock, who said three teams in her classes submitted feature designs for the competition.
Charles Simons, 13, of Eureka who was part of the design team said the playground also will serve as a place for tourists to take pictures because of the oversized Route 66 signs that serve as the base on each side of the playground features.
“It’s two Route 66 signs with monkey bars over the top of the slide platform and stairs to get to the monkey bars and a rock-climbing wall on the back,” Simons said.
Wildwood officials said the playground was selected as the winning project because of the simplicity of design and functionality.
“The design highlights Wildwood’s presence on Route 66 in a fun and creative way without overwhelming the rest of the park features,” officials said.
Wildwood officials said the contest was open to area elementary, middle and high school students from public or private schools or who are home schooled. They said 40 students worked on the 10 entries that were submitted.
“We thought the contest would be a great way to engage the entire community in the Route 66 Roadside Park Project and Wildwood’s Route 66 history,” officials said. “We knew we wanted this project to be a multigenerational effort from the very beginning, which is why we formed a Student Route 66 Taskforce, made up of four middle and four high school students from five area schools, to participate in the planning process for the park project and help implement the student design competition.”
Winning team
Simons worked with Garrett Anders, Preston Field, Zach Graves-Wilken, Trevor Sanson, Sammi Brown, Brooke Dammrich, Cole Thornton, Keith Major and Kaiden Pullen to create the winning project.
Simons said he used scaling and design abilities he learned from Rock on the project.
“We got to basically put all of our previous knowledge from the classroom into it,” he said.
Brown, 13, of Eureka said she is proud of what the team created.
“I thought that when we put all our heads together, we made a really good model,” she said.
Simons said he has always been interested in engineering, and this project has fueled his interest even more.
“It would be really interesting to take a class on this in high school or take a program,” he said. “It really motivated me to get into more engineering classes and programs.”
Brown said she also has more interest in engineering now.
“I feel like since we won I am not just some crazy mind in class. I feel like we all have good imaginations and it kind of shows now.”