English Teacher Adriaan Louw

　　If you were to look down at your feet now, chances are you’d see a nice pair of shoes. For a great deal of you, they will be sneakers. While we rarely, if ever, think about it, shoes are not haphazardly designed by a gremlin in a dark dungeon somewhere. A lot of very talented and well educated people spend a lot of time, effort, and money, to design every aspect of your shoes. While superficial things like colors are as varied as the people who wear shoes, the underlying design of shoes is broken down into areas such as comfort, fit, grip, main use, and many others. As a starting point for this project, students were asked “What makes a good shoe?” The goal of this, was to introduce them to materials in the polymer family.

　　Starting with the most basic knowledge and working towards a more detailed understanding, students were taught about the vocabulary relating to, and uses of, polymers. Polymers are incredibly important in everyday life, and feature in everything from water bottles to cars. They also make up a very important part of many modern sneakers.　

　　Having built up a good understanding of the basics, students were tasked with testing different mixtures to become familiar with the materials and how they affect the mixtures they made. They were then asked to create a polymer that could serve as the sole of a basketball shoe. Using what they learned about the results of adding more or less of the three ingredients they had access to (borax, water, and Elmer’s glue) they had to come up with what they believed to the be best ratio for a polymer.
　　During the create phase, while the teachers were quietly crying in a corner, students made a glorious, wet, sticky mess in the process of refining their polymers. Many bags of glue were harmed during this process, and some haircuts needed to be done after, but the process was great fun and an effective learning experience.
　　The test subjected the polymers to four distinct trials – How well could it stretch, window, ooze, and bounce. These things would help students understand how effective their polymer would be as a shoe midsole.
Leading on from this, students could make improvements to their recipe for a second trial. Finally, everybody got a chance to demonstrate their polymer to their classmates, and write a report on this messy adventure.　　　