Students show off engineering skills

The team of students of PV High School show of their underwater ROV at the Student Engineering Expo and Symposium last week. Photo by David Rosenfeld

The team of students of PV High School show of their underwater ROV at the Student Engineering Expo and Symposium last week. Photo by David Rosenfeld

An underwater rover. A robot that throws Frisbees. A solar-powered boat. These are several of the projects designed by Palos Verdes students in middle and high school that were on display last week at the Student Engineering Expo and Symposium.

The event, held by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Education Foundation at the Promenade on the Peninsula Mall, is meant to highlight the work done by students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program. This school year, the foundation contributed $200,000 to support STEM courses in middle and high schools district-wide, which have quickly become the most popular electives.

“In some ways it’s the new vogue shop course, this techie version of vocational education,” said STEM coordinator Scott Garner. “The idea is it supplements the core curriculum and gives them the skills to be successful.”

Students are applying principles of physics and mathematics to practical solutions like powering a robot to perform tasks or laser cutting an object.

“We’re trying to get these programs more exposure,” said Andrea Sala, executive director of the foundation. “All of this is such hands-on learning that it’s important to show people.”

Funding provided by the education foundation, while it does not support teacher salaries, does go toward the considerable costs of materials and competition fees, which without those the program would not be possible.

“A lot of the universities are concentrating in these areas now,” Sala said. “We don’t have enough engineers. Our goal is also to get girls involved. In middle school they are comfortable doing that. It’s a great program and we’re really proud of it. Here our donors can come see what their money is going toward.”

Hassan Twiet teaches a STEM course related to cyber security, which recently took a group of students to the finals in WashingtonDC in a competition called Cyber Patriot among 1,200 high schools. Janeline Wong and Bethany Grenier represented the group at the expo last week.

“We take a broken image of a computer and patch it up and make sure it’s secure,” Wong said. “It was hard at first, but you get the hang of it. It’s an important part of any field.”

“We try and protect the computers and make sure it’s non hackable and make sure they are running well and smoothly,” Grenier said. “Especially now with everything getting bigger and hacking getting easier you need to step up security.”

At a nearby table a team of PalosVerdesHigh School students showed off an underwater rover designed to perform simple tasks. The miniature submarine contains a propulsion system, a robotic hand and a camera. An image is transmitted to a laptop on the surface where an operator uses a Playstation 2 controller to manipulate its movement.

This year seniors like JJ Kuwata, who helped build the original model, passed down what they knew to the younger students.

“The even bigger picture is that they’re able to do problem solving,” Kuwata said. “To be able to get the taste of marine technologies is one thing, but more importantly is to be able to fabricate something and make it better and be able to solve any problem.”

Luke Letwin was part of a team of PV High students who built a solar-powered boat and competed in it earlier this year in Temecula. Letwin said the experience has helped him decide to be an engineer.

“I had a lot of fun with the boat and it’s something I could see myself doing later in life,” he said. ER

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