KUA STEM Team Places 3rd in National Competition

For the second consecutive year, KUA's STEM team has placed 3rd in the Real World Design Challenge national competition. The team earned a berth at the competion after winning the New Hampshire state championship for the third year in a row last spring.

Team members Jin Kato, (Tokyo, Japan), Asher Lantz (Newport, NH) and Ryan Lee (Seoul, Korea), sophomores Grace Cahill (Athens, Ohio) and Henry Hamilton (Newport, NH) and freshmen Jason Hu (Beijing, China) and Arthur Hwang (Perth, Australia) traveled to Washington, DC for the competion last weekend with coach Dr. Thomas Pasquini. 

The Real World Design Challenge (RWDC) is an annual competition that provides high school students, grades 9-12, the opportunity to work on real world engineering challenges in a team environment.

This year's state challenge was to design a Small Unmanned Aircraft (UAS) to support precision agriculture, specifically the monitoring and assessment of crop conditions to achieve increased yield. The teams were required to employ a systems engineering design and integration approach to identify, compare, analyze, demonstrate, and defend the most appropriate component combinations, subsystem designs, operational methods, and business case to support the challenge scenario. Through use of an inquiry-based learning approach with mentoring and coaching, the students had an opportunity to learn the skills and general principles associated with the challenge in a highly interactive and experiential setting.
 
“This competition requires students to draw on a complete range of 21st century skills,” says the KUA team’s coach, Dr. Thomas Pasquini, “From problem solving, critical thinking and communication to leadership, teamwork and creativity. These students have challenged themselves on many levels.”
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