At the 14th annual eCYBERMISSION competition the ninth grade Pluperfect team from Gardner Edgerton High School consisting of Blake Malkames, Rachel Antoszewski and Cooper Hart created a perpetual motion machine for energy conservation.

“Basically attach a generator to spin forever with unlimited electricity that is better than burning fossil fuels,” Malkames said.

The Pluperfect team placed second as state winners and received $500 per student in U.S. EE savings bonds.

“We were all very surprised but excited,” Hart said. “We started to build our machine second semester.”

The eCYBERMISSION is a web-based competition that is one of several science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competitions offered by the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP). eCYBERMISSION challenges students to develop solutions for real world problems in their local community.

Students can receive up to $9,000 dollars in U.S. EE savings bonds after competing in state, regional, and national level competitions.

Teams start working on on their submissions in October and then submit their final project through the eCYBERMISSION website to be judged virtually by a panel of judges. “About two weeks after [submitting] we got the results back,” Antoszewski said.