Several teams of Harker students received recognition at this year’s Tech Challenge, held by The Tech Interactive in San Jose. Each year, the Tech Challenge invites students in grades 4-12 to use engineering skills to solve a real-life problem. This year’s task was to use recycled cardboard to create a useful appliance that could transform into another useful appliance. Because this year’s Tech Challenge was held virtually, teams showed their work for judges at a virtual showcase.
Nicholas Knauer, Ameera Ramzan, Adrian Roufas and Chelsea Xie, the sixth graders who made up team Yes We CAAN, won the Outstanding Overall award for creating a cat playhouse that could also be repurposed into an organizer for books and writing utensils.
Team RASA – an acronym made with the first initials of fifth graders Riya Chadha, Abby Heinlein, Sofe Jalil and Augusta Chen – went a similar route, creating a school supplies organizer that could be converted into a cat house. Their work won them the Judges’ Choice award for Outstanding Presentation.
Fifth graders Christian Choi, Matthew Lee and Andrew Pangborn – who competed as Team MAC n Cheese – won the Outstanding Engineering Design Process award for their creation of a small desk that could be converted into a trash can. They were also finalists in the video contest.
Two Harker teams took home awards earlier this month at the Tech Challenge Showcase, hosted by the Tech Interactive in San Jose. Harker fifth graders Sylvia Chen, Nicholas Knauer, Ameera Ramzan and Adrian Roufas, known collectively as Team NASA, were one of two teams in the Grades 4-5 category to receive the Outstanding Overall award at the 2020 Tech Challenge Showcase, hosted by the Tech Museum of San Jose. In the video contest, Team RASA — whose acronym is derived from the first letter from the first name of each team member: fourth graders Riya Chaddha, Abby Heinlein, Sofe Jalil and Augusta Chen — took third place for their video chronicling the development of their project, competing against every team in every age group.
The showcase and awards ceremony, which attracted over 2,300 students representing more than 500 teams, moved to a virtual format this year because of shelter-in-place restrictions.
Teams this year were challenged to build a launcher that can propel separate devices through a 10-foot high hoop and land in a pre-defined area. The devices are then supposed to expand to larger size, with both the area and volume being key metrics for evaluating overall performance. While building three separate components (a launcher, area device and volume device) is challenging enough, teams this year had to work under the restrictions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Team NASA rose to the challenge. Starting in March, during the critical home stretch, team members practiced social distancing by conducting virtual meetings over Zoom and found ways to divide work without getting together physically.
Over the weekend, four Harker teams won awards in the 2018 Tech Challenge Showcase, held at the Tech Museum in San Jose. At the event, teams of grade 4-12 students demonstrated the devices they had constructed for this year’s contest. More than 600 teams comprising 2,000 students entered the competition, which challenged them to design and build a device that could successfully fall 10 feet into a drop zone, then deliver a payload to a target situated on a ramp, without the aid of batteries or electricity.
Grade 4 students Sofia Shah, Minal Jalil, MacEnzie Blue, Tiffany Zhu, Tanvi Sivakumar, Arushi Sahasi and honorary team member Rocky (Jalil’s dog) formed team “SMMARTT,” which received an outstanding overall award in the grades 4-5 category.
Sixth graders Nathan T. Liu, Adrian Liu and Aniketh Tummala, known as the “Huskies,” won the award for top tech challenge story, which explained the origins of the device they built. The “FlyteZON” team, made up of Neel Handa, Om Tandon and Zachary Blue, all grade 6, won an award for being outstanding overall.
Team “Flopper Waffles” – grade 7 students Brian Chen, Andrew Fu, Jacob Huang and Nicholas Wei – received an award for outstanding device performance.