WATERLOO - Kiarra Bradford wound the propeller of her handmade airplane around and around, tightening the rubber band stretched along its length.

Though she won second place in a competition with other Waterloo eighth-graders, she's still not sure how to predict its direction.

"It goes wherever," said Bradford, who will be in eighth grade at the new George Washington Carver Academy.

As Bradford's airplane flew overhead, other students wrapping up the weeklong Gateway Academy at Hawkeye Community College on Friday flew paper air gliders over the floor, shot wooden race cars down a track or fiddled with their battery-powered engines made of paper clips and spinning metal coils.

"It was fun," said Emily Meier, who will be an eighth-grader at Central Middle School.

In its third year, Gateway Academy - a joint program of Project Lead the Way and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation - taught 24 youths how to design and build their racing, flying and spinning creations.

Shelly Smith, coordinator of the Academy, said the soon-to-be eighth-graders from all four Waterloo middle schools also took a tour of Waterloo West High School's prototyping machine and listened to a high school teacher talk about engineering applications.

"We really want kids to focus on the future and how that can get started at an early age," Smith said.

Bob Morgan and Wayne Lidtke, both industrial technology instructors at Waterloo middle schools, taught the two dozen handpicked students at Gateway Academy.

"When we were kids, (engineering) was bridges, buildings and highways. Today, it's everything," Morgan said.

They noted the eighth-graders were chosen for their proficiency in math and science.

"Some are so smart, they're bored," Lidtke said.

Not only does Bradford like the class, but she makes other rubber band-powered contraptions by herself at home - already showing an interest in engineering, said her mother, Kassandra Todd.

"I always tell her, 'You just never know what you can do,'" Todd said.