Building believable zombies and walking giant insects are class projects at Fullerton Union High
Creating a zombie in real life has been a bit more complicated for Erin Sharp, a junior at Fullerton Joint Union High School, than how it happens in “The Walking Dead.”
Sharp spent weeks learning the characteristics of zombies. She came up with a story – An Atlantis resident turned zombie after getting infected with a virus – inspired by her own life as a water polo player. Then, she studied how to take a mold her face and mar the figure to make it look as an ocean-living zombie would look.
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“We don’t tell them how specifically to do any of this,” physics teacher Jim Pitochelli said. “We give them guidelines and they gotta figure it out on their own.”
Pitochelli and art teacher Scott Hudson lead Fullerton Union High’s three-year-old Biology Engineering Arts Science Technology program, BEAST, in which students, including Sharp, are taught how they can use science to bring movie-like figures to real life.
The idea is to have students think differently about how they see science, Hudson said, moving away from equations and long Latin names and toward real-life applications.
Along the way, the program gives students skills and a portfolio to pursue careers such as special effects artist – there is a field trip to Knott’s Berry Farm for a meeting with its makeup department.
The program’s second-year students are making zombies in Hudson’s class, while the first-year students are making gigantic prehistoric insects in Pitochelli’s class.
Walk into the classrooms and you see the mash-ups of a wood shop, a maker space – with seven 3-D printers – and an art room.
“We are trying to build the world’s coolest garage,” Hudson said.
The program started small: Creating just a mechanical throwing arm. But Pitochelli and Hudson’s goal has been the same: Give students a real-life experience of using science and arts that they can’t get anywhere else.
“We’re not coding. We’re not learning physics. We’re building prehistoric insects,” Pitochelli said. “In the end, those things will be wriggling around and look like the things we see in Disneyland.”
That means Anthony Cabello, a junior, is programming sensors in his mechanical trilobite, so it and all of its tiny legs will move like a real insect and won’t crash into a wall.
That means two juniors, Wyatt Logan and Zach Martinez, are creating a big mechanical walking caterpillar that won’t fall apart while its insides hold all kinds of wires, power supplies and sensors.
That means Julian Melchor, a senior, is sculpting clay into parasites and leeches for a zombie face. “I’ve learned a lot more about zombies and how they decay.”
The class is “controlled chaos,” per Pitochelli. Wires fall apart left and right. The molds didn’t come out quite dry for some zombies. Wood components didn’t fit snug for the caterpillar.
But the students are learning through those failures, Pitochelli said.
And they have been eager to learn new skills such as carpentry, and ultimately, Pitochelli said, “Students are saying, ‘I didn’t know I liked carpentry.’”
Some of the students are even thinking about doing this for their career. Melchor, who wants to be a makeup artist, said: “I got more into it because of this class.”
Pitochelli and Hudson said they want to grow the program, bringing in a chemistry class and giving students more freedom to create what they want.
“We are not building the next generation of assemblers,” Hudson said. “We want to build the next generation of innovators.”