Sniff Swing and Swipe 1- Winner of the DEANZ 2002 Award 2002
Fifteen hundred students throughout New Zealand, as well as a class in Brunei, took part. Among the innovative designs that students came up with were a modified weighted basketball that spits out food when nuzzled by a zebra, and a papier mache log filled with holes containing little camera cannisters filled with meal worms for the Zoo's meerkats. The latter was also buried in sand, which enhanced the behavioural enrichments benefits to these animals, as they had to discover as well as work out how to extract their reward. A group of eleven year olds designed a solar-powered eagle to fly over the meerkat enclosure with the aim of encouraging natural behaviour and a nine-year-old homeschooler, who had never seen a zebra, designed a barrel that gave food rewards through holes when rolled. To trial her prototype she used her pet horse. Another
useful enrichment was an eight year olds' kea food dispenser prototype,
consisting of a bucket of water with some floating food suspended
over the stream in the kea enclosure. The intention was that when
the kea landed on the bucket, it would tip, sending water and food
into the stream below.
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