Blue Mountain Academy in Hamburg scored the highest at the regional chapter of the Governor’s PA STEM Competition on Feb. 1, hosted by the Berks County Intermediate Unit in Reading.
Of the 64 aggregate points, Blue Mountain Academy scored the highest with 44.25, followed closely by Berks Catholic High School with a score of 44.15 and Wilson High School bringing up third with 40.32 points. Hamburg High School and Exeter Township High School participated but did not place.
Under the theme “Building a Stronger Pennsylvania”, five regional teams comprising five students each participated in the competition for grades 9 to 12, with Blue Mountain Academy of Hamburg emerging the winner.
“We award monetary prizes to the top three teams-$100, $50 and $25 goes to the respective schools-and then the top winning high-school team competes in the state championship on May 27,” said Joshua Hoyt, BCIU Program Administrator. “The winning team also gets a stipend (of $750) to make enhancements to their regional project in preparation for the state championship.”
At the regional level, the competition is basically three-pronged: prototype demonstration, project plan presentation and “Project in a Box” activity. This year’s “Project in a Box” activity involved designing a paper projectile, flying it and landing it on a precise spot on a tarpaulin without breaking the egg placed inside it.
“There was supposed to be 10 teams in total, but now there are only five as some of the teams fell back due to the bad weather,” said BCIU Online Learning and Technology Specialist Jillian Darlington. “This is the third year we have held this event at BCIU, although we do organize other similar STEM events but for different age levels. For judges, we have business contacts from the Berks County.”
For their prototype design, the Blue Mountain Academy drew inspiration from the Chinese puzzle Sheng Feng.
“In addition to doing something cool, it also looks cool!” said team sponsor Rosemarie Bechtel.
And what exactly does it do? Team member Matt Guy had it down pat.
“A lot of people during the winter suffer from seasonal effective disorder, which is the sort of disorder or depression that comes from not being exposed to the light when you have short days. This also applies to people who work night shifts. During our research we found that the eyes have intrinsically photo-sensitive ganglions that direct blue light not to the visual cortex but to the pineal glands which secrete serotonin which affects mood. So our devise is meant to jump start that when you don’t have an actual sun,” said Guy.
“During our research we also found that the blue light that activate the pineal gland’s serotonin production is harmful at night because it inhibits melatonin production which helps you sleep. So while we do want blue light to get you up and keep you happy, we don’t want it at night when you want to get to sleep. So in additional to having the panel which is bluish, in our prototype we have a light bulb with a film covering it to inhibit the blue light,” he said.
“Technically, it then becomes a yellow light!” chipped in team member Sharyl Cubero.
How many months did it take? “Months? We designed it last night!” said Iliana Dialectakis, to laughter from her team.
Incredible as that might sound, Bechtel explained that “they have been researching it for over a month.”
As the Exeter Township Senior High School team got their project plan presentation ready, group advisor Zachary Potter spoke at length about the time and effort that went into preparing. This was their second year participating. Last year the team won third place.
“This year I have an entirely new group of students,” he said.
Starting around October, they worked two to three days a week. The past week they worked four to five days a week when they meet, time after school and then at home.
“That’s one of the things I talk about when I am looking for kids for the team; it’s a huge time commitment. But it is a great opportunity for the kids to get experience in the design process and real-world challenges because if they become engineers that’s what they will be doing on a daily basis,” Potter said.
Greg King, advisor to the Hamburg Area High School team, said one of the bigger struggles was to come up with the idea in keeping with the theme.
“It’s a prototype that needs to benefit Pennsylvanians and it should be locally focused,” said King.
“We sat down and came up with something the kids would be interested in and they wanted to make sure that what they designed was fit for Hamburg. So they designed a water purification devise for hikers on the Appalachian trail and a number of other local trails.”
Kept at regular intervals along the trail, the device “allowed hikers to pump that water, filter it automatically and drink the purified water,” King explained.
For the prototype, within $500 the students could use whatever materials necessary.
“In fact, my team this year didn’t need so many materials because our model was more in the virtual world involving computer programming and so on,” Potter said, talking about the prototype built by the Exeter team.
This year, the Exeter Township Senior High School students decided to tackle the problem of distracted driving, a traffic hazard not just in Pennsylvania but also throughout the country and the world. They called it ALECS (Automated Listening Electronic Car Signals).
“They built a model of a little devise that you can put in your car and it will assist you with your turn signals; it will activate your turn signals with a speech recognition software. Together with your turn signals, you can also activate your hazard lights the same way. It is essentially a ‘command based’ system,” Potter said.
Prototype done, Monday saw the teams pooling their ideas and brainstorming for the next challenge, “Project in a Box.”
“To me what’s amazing is that these five groups presented five different approaches (to fly and land the paper projectile without breaking the egg placed inside it),” said judge Adam Heinze. “One used a regular missile type with a drag on it and another one was a straight missile. Others tried to put a plane together. It was a good variety of different approaches and nobody copied each other, they were all unique and came up with very different ideas.”
Judge Lisa Peterson was appreciative of the overall conduct of the participating teams.
“I liked how they were very supportive and collaborative of each other,” she said. “We had no teams that were mean and cutting each other down with ‘Oh, that’s a dumb idea’. It was a nice atmosphere.”
The state finals will be held on May 27 at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster.
