St. Peter’s student places third in Ohio coloring contest

Antonio Brent, a second grader at St. Peter’s School in Mansfield, has won third place in the 2026 Imagine Engineering Coloring Contest.

Brent’s drawing was selected from a record-breaking 10,269 entries from second graders across Ohio, according to a community announcement. He will be recognized at an awards luncheon June 13 in Columbus.

Brent’s drawing depicts an engineer visiting a construction site. The central figure, wearing personal protective equipment, reviews plans and specifications while a crew works with heavy equipment in the background.

As a third-place winner, Brent will receive a National Geographic Mega Science Lab with 75 STEM experiments.

Imagine Engineering program introduced in 1999

The Imagine Engineering program was founded by the Engineers Foundation of Ohio in 1999. Since then, the Ohio Society of Professional Engineers has enlisted its members to visit local classrooms and explain what engineers do for a living.

The program is designed to help second graders understand what engineering is and how it impacts their everyday lives. It also aims to inspire students to consider careers in engineering by introducing them to real engineers and hands-on experiments.

In 2021, EFO updated the program by adding an educational resource video titled “Imagine Engineering.” The video features Ohio professional engineers who explain engineering at a fundamental level and demonstrate hands-on experiments that support the second-grade curriculum.

In 2023, EFO received a grant from the P&G Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation to expand the program to include Ohio’s Spanish-speaking second graders. The Spanish translation of the video includes a Spanish-speaking engineer to narrate the lesson and subtitles for the experiments.

“Imagine Engineering is a children’s program that is unique to Ohio, having been created by the Engineers Foundation of Ohio in the late 1990s,” EFO President Joe Cherry said in the announcement. “Over the last quarter of a century, Imagine Engineering has helped ignite the imaginations of tens of thousands of children statewide, encouraging them to focus on math and science – and perhaps a career in engineering.”

For more information about the Imagine Engineering program, visit ohioengineer.com.

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