Would he or wouldn't he?

That was the question third-grade students at Woodward Academy aimed to answer. Would their assistant principal, all 6-foot-1-inch and 220 pounds of him, float across the pool on floats the students built out of recycled materials for a class project?

GALLERY: Could floats built by third graders keep assistant principal afloat?

"They had a design project in which we put them into groups and they were then responsible for working together, bringing in materials, getting ideas, trying things out, reworking it, trying to solve (the) problem of trying to float this big old guy on a raft," assistant principal Eric Mitchell told Nelson's News.

Mitchell manned 10 somewhat seaworthy creations in his attempts. The first few went fairly well. And while the point of the project was to build just a float that would take Mitchell from one side of the pool to the other, all the students wanted to see Mitchell take a tumble into the waters below.

"A few of them floated and a few of them have sunk," third-grader Hunter Exline noted.

Mitchell said just about all 10 floats were seaworthy, balance was just an issue on a few of them where he took a tumble.