Army-Navy High School STEM Day 2022
POSTED ON: Saturday, February 5, 2022 12:00 AM by Christine Maceo
On February 5, 2022, the USNA STEM Center hosted the first annual Army-Navy High School student STEM Day. Thirty-two high school students from Maryland and Virginia attended this competitive engineering event, which was executed exclusively by service academy students. USNA midshipmen Andreas Casillas, Adan Valdez, Lian Dunlevy, Ella Vath and Maia Vath led the sixteen students on the NAVY TEAM, and United States Military Academy (USMA) cadets Cynthia Sun, Caleb Peterson, Keno Deary and Dhyuti Gopalakrishna led the sixteen students on the ARMY TEAM. USNA STEM Faculty Joe McGettigan, Mark Murray, LCDR Melissa Szurovy and Christine Maceo were joined by USMA STEM Faculty LTC Andrew Lee (Mathematics) and Pratheek Manjunath (Robotic Engineering). Logistical assistance was provided by ONR Reservists Jeffrey Pang and Katie Ellefson (USNA 2013) and twelve midshipmen: Gustel Bamanabio, Biron McNeely, Miyuu Handa, Daisy Reasbeck, Ariel Sheckley, Leeann Beckman, Sean Kulig, Anna Sawyer, Keandre Harper, Khadijah McClean, and Brant Purcell. Special guest Army Research Lab STEM Outreach Coordinator Jaime Wilson also attended the event.
After each team learned its spirit cheer (The Goat is Old and Gnarly for NAVY and the Rocket Cheer for ARMY), the event curriculum included Website Design, Electric Circuits and Soldering, Robotics Coding, Fluid Dynamics and Rocket Design, Structures and Triangles, and Bridge Building. The students attended each session and used undergraduate lab equipment in a different USNA Engineering Laboratory, which included the Computer, Electrical Engineering, Naval Architecture, Fluids, Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Materials Labs. All student participants went home with successfully completed webpages, soldered blinking robots, straw rockets, and geodesic domes. Throughout the day, students worked in teams and competed in three culminating competitive events based on the engineering principles learned in the academic portion of the day: timed Robotic Programming Races, Rocket Target Hits, and Bridge Crushing. Having won two out of the three competitions (Robots and Rockets), the ARMY team was awarded the coveted Army-Navy STEM Commander-in-Chief trophy, which made the long trip back to West Point for the coming year. The trophy will be awarded to the winner of next year’s Army-Navy STEM Day, which will be hosted by USMA at West Point.
The USNA STEM Center is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), DoD STEM and the Naval Academy Foundation. ONR provided funding for this inaugural event.
Category: General Interest