Colleagues,
We are excited to share some incredible news from a team of students at Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical in Rochester. Their submission to NASA’s fourth annual “TechRise Student Challenge” was selected as a winning entry. The team from Old Colony was the only Massachusetts school to be selected.
MAVA extends its congratulations to the OC team on this incredible accomplishment!! Additional information is provided below.
David
NASA Selects Winners of Fourth TechRise Student Challenge
A few weeks ago, NASA announced 60 winning teams for its fourth TechRise Student Challenge, a nationwide contest to engage students in technology, science, and space exploration. The middle and high school student teams will work together to turn their proposed science and technology experiments into reality ahead of NASA-sponsored flight tests in summer 2025.
Each winning team will receive a prize package that consists of:
$1,500 to build their experiment
A flight box in which to build it
An assigned spot to test their experiment on a NASA-sponsored flight.
Their experiments will fly on a high-altitude balloon operated by World View Enterprises of Tucson, Arizona.
Winning proposals address a wide variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) challenges, including studying ozone levels and volatile organic compounds, testing the effects of radiation on different materials, and using environmental sensors to gather data for Earth-observation experiments.
Old Colony Students:
Leianne Laine
Douglas Barrows
William Kane
Tyler Moskos
Audrey Perkins
Sean Plouffe
Team lead (teacher):Patrick Parks
Their proposal was to look at the effects of temperature and pressure on the process of electrolysis. Their goal is to look at how astronauts might create oxygen in other environments, either in space or elsewhere. The high-altitude balloon vehicle provided by NASA allows them to test this in a real environment.
This project is challenging in that students must create the design themselves, with some assistance from a NASA engineer mentor. Students will learn basic skills such as mounting, iterative design, soldering, coding, product management, and much more. Each week, students have a set of requirements to keep them on track and learn specific skills with their NASA mentor.
David J. Ferreira
MAVA Communications Coordinator
DavidFerreira
