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HCPSS Students Excel at 2018 State MESA Competition

May 30th, 2018

A team from Patapsco Middle School recently earned first place in the state-level National Engineering Design Challenge, and three Howard County schools earned state-level recognition at the Maryland State Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement (MESA) competitions. The event was hosted at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Center in Laurel, Maryland.

The winning Patapsco Middle School student team will represent Maryland at the MESA National Engineering Design Challenge competition in Philadelphia, June 19-23.

The Patapsco Middle School team also took first place in the Alice Game Design and Hovercraft challenges. The Reservoir High School team won first place in the Basswood Bridge challenge. The St. John’s Lane Elementary School team won first place in the Scratch Software challenge and third place in the Balsawood Bridge challenge.

Students at the elementary, middle and high school grade levels competed in interactive game design challenges and built bridges out of basswood and balsa wood under strict guidelines that tested structural integrity. The contestants’ creative and innovative abilities were evaluated in events that included creating a theme park ride based on a book, hovercraft construction and racing, and effective communications. High school teams built and programmed Cyber Robots and other robots designed to square off in a battleball robot challenge arena.

Middle and high school students demonstrated the engineering design process in the National Engineering Design Challenge by implementing a human-centered design approach to a client’s needs using Arduino, an open-source platform used for building electronics projects.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Maryland MESA program identifies and supports Grades 3–8 students statewide to prepare them for STEM-related college majors. MESA seeks to target students who are traditionally underrepresented in these fields—specifically minority and female students.