{"id":177159,"date":"2024-05-16T13:21:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=177159"},"modified":"2024-05-16T14:08:32","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T14:08:32","slug":"stem-design-challenge-students-create-autonomous-solutions-to-monitor-water-quality-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=177159","title":{"rendered":"STEM Design Challenge Students Create Autonomous Solutions to Monitor Water Quality, Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A total of 38 students representing nine teams from Monterey, Pacific Grove and Salinas participated in the 2024 Design Challenge, focusing their efforts on the use of autonomous platforms to monitor water quality, oceans, and the environment. On May 14, these student-faculty teams were honored by NPS during a ceremony at the Moss Landing Marine Labs.<\/p>\n

Senior leaders from NPS joined representatives from Design Challenge collaborators and partners in recognizing the winning student-faculty teams, representing Salinas\u2019 Alisal High School, Pacific Grove High School and Monterey\u2019s Santa Catalina School. The teams were competing for a chance to win prizes up to $2,000, sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started three years ago with a program to try and encourage hands-on STEM learning through an iterative process whereby you guys are allowed to try things that don’t have a solution to them,\u201d said Dr. Mara Orescanin, director of NPS\u2019 Consortium for Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) and one of the organizers of the Design Challenge. \u201cSo you had to dabble with a real-world problem \u2013 you have to think outside the box, you have to learn how to fail and how to learn from that failure to iterate on the next design. And this is what real scientists and engineers do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Retired Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, President of NPS, joined\u00a0Dr. Alan Van Nevel, NPS Associate Provost for Research, and\u00a0NPS Foundation Vice President Todd Lyons in presenting student team members with letters of recognition for their efforts.<\/p>\n

Following the ceremony, teachers and students had an opportunity to tour the historic fishing vessel Western Flyer, made famous by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts during their 1940 voyage to the Gulf of California, and which now has new life as a\u00a0science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and research platform run by the Western Flyer Foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u00a0students give me a good feeling, a lot of hope about the future, because you have shown that you’re willing to take a problem that you don’t know anything about, look at it, fail \u2013 hopefully, not too many times \u2013 and then try new ideas, keep an open mind, and come up with a solution,\u201d said Van Nevel. \u201cAnd those qualities will serve you well for a long time to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro released the 2024 Naval Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy, which called for a greater focus on STEM education and outreach opportunities across the nation.<\/p>\n

The Rapid Innovation Design Challenge, led by Orescanin and Dr. David Ortiz-Suslow, aligns with this new strategy and other commitments by NPS and the Department of the Navy to increase educational equity in STEM \u2013 as well as to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cNPS is proud to support the STEM Rapid Innovation Design Challenge with the Office of Naval Research to invest in the next generation of innovators and leaders for our Navy and our nation,\u201d said Rondeau. \u201cWhile the celebratory energy in the\u00a0award ceremony was great to see, I noticed something else after the event that is the\u00a0real reward of such efforts. I watched as one of the young high school ladies showed and demonstrated her model to a group of students as they crowded around her and asked questions. She was beaming with pride, and that is the payoff of this work \u2013 building the desire for discovery engendered in inquiring minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Design Challenge, which ran from Feb. 1 to April 16, was developed in collaboration with industry and technology experts. It featured a focus on autonomous technology and its use in creating two types of platforms \u2013 one for making ocean and atmospheric measurement during storm events, the other for monitoring coastal water quality. According to Orescanin, these elements were inspired by the flooding of watersheds throughout Monterey County last winter, as well as a desire to understand extreme weather events of all types.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCRUSER Grand Championship,\u201d emblematic of the competition\u2019s top honor, and the $2,000 grand prize were presented to a team from Pacific Grove High for its efforts to understand the Design Challenge\u2019s iterative process, identify an area to be improved in data collection, and create a solid prototype for how to implement their solution with an autonomous platform.<\/p>\n

Their result was the \u201cStormChaser Sentry,\u201d which tackled the challenge of atmospheric and ocean measurement in extreme weather events. Teacher Sally Richmond\u2019s team took a platform that was designed for wave monitoring and augmented it with sensors for determining location, wind speed, air temperature and humidity, barometric pressure, and wave period and height.<\/p>\n

In addition to the grand prize, Pacific Grove High took home honors in one of the three runner-up categories, each of which awarded a $500 prize. The school\u2019s second winning entry came courtesy of student Antony Gabrik, who captured the \u201cPersuasive Pitch\u201d award for his video presentation on improving data collection to make a connection between actions on land and their biological and environmental impacts offshore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our third year competing \u2013 we’ve had a great time each year, and we’ve managed to win an award each time,\u201d said Richmond. \u201cWe look forward to doing it again next year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another runner-up category, \u201cBest Storm Tracker Solution,\u201d went to Santa Catalina School\u2019s \u201cTeam Wanandi,\u201d which generated the most unique solution for gathering data during storms. The team created an autonomous open-water platform whose spherical design allowed for more stability and durability in varying wave and storm states.<\/p>\n

The final runner-up category, \u201cBest Water Quality Monitoring Solution,\u201d was won by Alisal High and its \u201cSmall Organic Remeasuring Tool,\u201d or SORT, for representing the most unique solution for monitoring water quality. In addition to using a colorimeter that can be programmed for multiple water quality measurements such as pH, ammonia or chloride levels, SORT has a compartment for a whiteleg shrimp, which can serve as an indicator of high pesticide levels in the water.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have played a critical role in designing real potential solutions for these problems,\u201d Orescanin said. \u201cThese are actual problems scientists face \u2013 and we have the scientists with us today who study these problems at NPS. It is great to see such creative, innovative thinking in our high schools. We’re here to recognize that \u2013 that all of you are amazing by contributing to this process, and hope that you enjoyed yourself along the way.<\/p>\n

The Rapid Innovation Design Challenge program is designed to build excitement about STEM, mitigate barriers to experiential learning opportunities for all students, introduce students to emerging technologies, and strengthen community capacity to offer impactful education opportunities. It includes scaffolded curricula that match critical skills for higher education and a modern workforce to school standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each challenge integrates critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and written communication skills as teams explore applications of science, technology, engineering and math to create meaningful solutions with global impact.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Rapid Innovation Design Challenge is an opportunity for the Naval Postgraduate School to share its unique expertise in STEM with the local community,\u201d Lyons said. \u201cThe Naval Postgraduate School\u00a0Foundation & Alumni Association is dedicated to supporting NPS and has supported the Design\u00a0Challenge since its inception.\u00a0We look forward to supporting future Rapid Innovation Design Challenges and building even closer connections between NPS and the local community.\u201d<\/p>\n

NPS is already planning for the 2025 Rapid Innovation Design Challenge, with launch scheduled for the fall of 2024. As part of a growing initiative at NPS to foster graduate student mentorship in the community, the upcoming iteration of the Design Challenge will include the opportunity for pairing participating classes with NPS students as mentors and to provide insight into career pathways in STEM. More information about the Design Challenge program is available at\u00a0https:\/\/nps.edu\/design-challenge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The collaboration conducted under the auspices of the Rapid Innovation Design Challenge does not constitute endorsement of non-federal organizations or their products and services by the Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A total of 38 students representing nine teams from Monterey, Pacific Grove and Salinas participated in the 2024 Design Challenge, focusing their efforts on the use of autonomous platforms to monitor water quality, oceans, and the environment. On May 14, these student-faculty teams were honored by NPS during a ceremony at the Moss Landing Marine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":177161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177159"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177162,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177159\/revisions\/177162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/177161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}