Todd Stam, owner of Aspen Homes in Coeur d'Alene, thought judging the Woodland eighth-graders' floor plan designs would be easy.

After about 10 minutes and several laps around the table at Coldwell Banker that held the designs created by the five finalists, checking for functionality of the homes and looking at the exterior as well, Stam finally made a decision — 14-year-old Ryan Stephenson was the grand prize winner.

"All of them looked really good," Stam said. "They all seemed to be really good size and in the end, one of them stood out as being my favorite."

Each of the five finalists from Azure Wilson's eighth-grade Woodland Middle School class received a T-shirt and $25, and Ryan was awarded the grand prize of a helicopter tour of Kootenai County for him and two friends accompanied by Stam.

"I'm pretty excited — I've never rode in a helicopter before," Ryan said.

The other four finalists were Conner Sundstrom, Rebecca Nielsen, Abbey Ghan and Max Kennedy.

Wilson teaches design technology at Woodland and the EXCEL Foundation gave her a grant in October for $7,500 to purchase a 3-D printer. Two of the agents at Coldwell Banker, Michael Ward and Kathleen Tillman, are members of the EXCEL board. In 30 years of funding grants to teachers in the Coeur d'Alene School District, Ward said, the EXCEL Foundation has given out more than $1 million in grants.

"It's all about providing monies to teachers to be able to think way outside the box," Ward said. "The community has been great the last 30 years and this is just another shining example of a teacher that writes up the proper grant, asks for the right reasons and then turns it into some cool things."

Ward has been on the EXCEL board for 10 years and said every few years a teacher comes along with a grant that can translate into a future career for the kids. Each member of the EXCEL board is assigned a teacher and Tillman was assigned to Wilson. After receiving the grant in October, Wilson informed Tillman the students would be designing floor plans of homes as an end-of-year project.

"We just thought she has so much enthusiasm for her classes," Tillman said. "I thought this was such a great project to take it further and show the kids how to transition into the real world."

Wilson said the students worked on the project for about seven weeks. About 150 eighth-graders started the project by learning about house design, structure and measurement, and looking at houses online to see how some were designed. The students learned how to scale down a room using graph paper and using Google Sketchup to create a digital copy of their home.

The students then built foam board structures of their designs and Wilson used the 3-D printer to create miniature models of the floor plans for the five finalists chosen by Tillman and Ward. Ward said it was pretty easy to eliminate some of the original floor plans — like the ones that didn't have a bathroom.

Ryan said he has seen a lot of house designs and mixed together different aspects of the designs he liked. A couple of the more important things he said he included were a "big garage" and a bathroom in the master bedroom as well as a separate bathroom.

"This kid is extremely talented," Wilson said of Ryan, adding that he is building a robot in his science class. "He goes above and beyond."

Ryan said his favorite subjects are math and science.

"He is really creative and he is really into building things," said Ryan's mom, Megan. "He wants to be an engineer so he has an eye for design. I'm really proud of him."