Building ROVs on the West End

A team from Forks Middle School presenting their ROV to a group of judges

I am raising my kids on the Olympic Peninsula, and it takes a lot of work to feel like they have opportunities for enriching STEM activities that youth in more urban areas do.  And I'm saying that even though we live in Port Angeles, at 19,000 people the largest community on the Olympic Peninsula.  I can't even imagine what parents and students in some of the smaller and more rural communities on the west end of the Olympic Peninsula must experience.  To help in some small way to provide an opportunity is one of the reasons that I enthusiastically signed on to be a judge for the first ever MATE ROV Satellite competition, organized with help from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and held at the Forks, Washington pool on 20 May.

The Expeditioners from Lake Quinault School, presenting their poster.  This team won an award for, "Best Team Spirit" during the competition

This was my first ROV competition, and I must say that I was impressed.  The competition organization is phenomenal, with a rigorous system of rules and scoring.  Even more impressive was the effort put into the contest by the roughly 20 teams in attendance, representing schools from Lake Quinault, Taholah, Forks, La Push, Clallam Bay and Neah Bay.  Most of the teams represented were starting from the same point - in all cases that I saw starting from one of these kits - but from there teams diverged widely in terms of their solutions to the various challenges they needed to deal with.

The poster presentation and ROV for one of the teams from Clallam Bay High School, with some really nice engineering touches.  This team did a lot of trial and error testing, and came up with some innovations.

By way of example, check out this student from Lake Quinault School walk us through his team's ROV design:

So cool...so very cool.  I'm definitely in.