Deer Lakes eighth-grade students Emily Brockway and Elliana Crame earned the Honorable Mention award in the Mars New Year Steam Competition.

"It felt so good to earn an award for all the work we put into this project," Emily said. "This project was hard to navigate, but we finally figured it out and won an award."

The goal of the competition was to propose a solution to a problem that may occur on Mars if 100 people were to start a colony on the planet that is 140 million miles away from Earth. The proposal had to address helping the fictional colonists survive.

Emily and Elliana brainstormed a variety of ideas and considered how they could use Mars' ice caps to their advantage.

They made a model of a greenhouse-like structure, in which colonists would heat ice into filtered water that could be used to water plants as a food source for the colonists. The rest of the water would be stored in a holder for the colonists to drink. Their greenhouse model was constructed using recycled materials.

"I was happy about how our project turned out, but I was not expecting an award for it," Elliana said. "That's why when I learned Emily and I received an honorable mention from the competition I was shocked."