By Alex Wyckoff
Staff Writer
Mira Costa High School’s student AP Physics Team won the High School Innovation Challenge science competition hosted by the Northrop Grumman company in Redondo Beach on February 24.
The High School Innovation Challenge is an annual science competition hosted by Northrop Grumman, an association based in Ohio.
“It was awesome,” science teacher Johnathan Lewis said. “The team worked really well together, and they didn’t give up, and in the end they pulled through and their finished product turned out to be fantastic.”
The competition guidelines required the team to create a 6 x 6 x 6 inch cube which contained a remotely deployable sun shade, which could create a maximum amount of shade while keeping the size of the device as minimal as possible.
“We are a bit limited,” senior Gabriel Mel said. “We had a solution at the beginning that we couldn’t use because of guidelines. We were going to use a helium balloon, which wasn’t allowed, so we had to start again from scratch.”
The strict guidelines, the challenge in developing a solution, and turning in the first draft late, were all minor setbacks that the Costa team faced.
“I believe we were two days later on the primary rough draft,” Lewis said. “But our finished product was far superior to the other teams.”
The points which could be earned were determined based off of the designs, the actual device, and a seven minute power point presentation.
“A lot of the other teams had failure on launch,” Lewis said. “Their systems weren’t reliable. I’m assuming we got almost all of the points for the device.”
The official score of the competition has yet to be revealed, even though Costa won.
“The other teams were simply inadequate,” Lewis said. “They put in a lot of valiant efforts, but a lot of materials that they chose were very fragile. Compared to the other teams we saw, our product was just better in every aspect.”
Leave a Reply