While most kids spend the summer time relaxing and enjoying the much-deserved time off from a busy academic year, two Marble Cliff residents and current seniors at Grandview Heights High School, Carter Taylor and James Elliot, took a different approach.
From June through November, the two were tasked with providing movement and lights for six giant nutcrackers for the BalletMet Nutcracker Ball held in December 2019. The nutcrackers were originally a part of the State Auto Insurance holiday display in downtown Columbus until 2018 when they were donated to BalletMet.
Elliot and Taylor are members of the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team for GHHS, coached by Grant Douglass. They were able to take the knowledge gained from their experience and bring life to the once dormant decorations by adding moving parts and lights.
“We rebuilt the entire inside of the nutcracker,” Taylor says. “No one had any information on where they were manufactured or even the year. Leaving it up to us to search the internet to try and find parts and mechanisms that would fit together correctly.”
The project began as a puzzle piece, putting pieces together and then making all new bearings, gears and internal linkages. Elliot mentions that the power and light systems were replaced as well. Once the project wrapped in November, it was put on display at a fundraising event in December for BalletMet.
“We had no information manual to look at for the schematics of the nutcrackers,” Elliot says. “We created that based on the leftover parts, and then redesigned a similar system using modern components.”
While their accomplishments are impressive, the two students plan on continuing their engineering education in college this fall. Elliot plans to attend The Ohio State University next year to study electrical engineering and Taylor plans to study mechanical engineering at Miami University of Ohio.
“Having to organize our project, and create timelines for the work progress are valuable skills for college and our careers,” Taylor says. “We learned that you need to keep on pushing, sometimes we felt like we were going to give up, but we kept on going and, eventually, we got the job done.”
