'Eagle One' Team Wins Pennsylvania Real World Design Challenge
Challenge Brings World Class Engineering Experiences to Commonwealth Classrooms
3/3/2009
Harrisburg, PA (3/3/2009) – Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Cumberland County and its team “Eagle One” have been named the winner of the 2008 state-level Real World Design Challenge, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative. The student team and their coach, Mike Flowers, a technology education teacher at Cumberland Valley High School, will now go on to represent Pennsylvania in the national competition in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2009.
The Cumberland Valley team won a statewide competition that saw 25 schools compete for the award. The Real World Design Challenge is a first-of-its-kind, nationwide competition in which student teams across America compete to design a viable solution to a real-world engineering challenge. Ten states participated in the Challenge this year and one representative from each state has been chosen to compete in the National Challenge. This year’s challenge focused on a design problem in the aerospace industry.
Eagle One, along with the other nine teams, will be given additional goals, metrics and exponents and will modify their design to meet the National Challenge requirements. The teams will have roughly three weeks to complete their modified solution and on March 21, 2009 they will present and defend that solution to a diverse panel of judges at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Cumberland Valley’s Eagle One was chosen as the winner from a select group of four finalists. The other three finalists were McDowell Blue from McDowell Senior High School in Erie, the CCA Avians from Commonwealth Connections Academy Charter School and the Eagle Engineers from Youngsville High School in Warren County. These four finalists were among 25 Pennsylvania teams, the second highest enrollment of any state participating in the challenge.
Eagle One is coached by Michael Flowers, Technology Education Teacher at Cumberland Valley High School and a long-time champion of real-world experiential learning. “You can teach formulas”, he says, “but until students learn to apply them, the skills really do not sink in”.
Team members Cody Ambrose, Jeff Pope, Kyle Gochenaur and Vladimir Grinevich took the hands-on experiences that they were presented with and turned them into a design that has earned them the Pennsylvania State Championship and a place in the National Finals. “My favorite part was the challenge”, Ambrose, a Junior, said. “It was a big challenge. I got very excited because I thought, ‘If I can accomplish this, I can do much more.’” “This puts you in the real world,” added Senior Vladimir Grinevich, “You get to experience organization, scheduling, teamwork and other skills you will need to know on the job.”
All four team members and their teacher emphasized that this challenge is not for everyone. It requires long hours, hard work and perseverance. But, for this team, the challenge was worth it. When asked their favorite part, Junior Kyle Gochenaur replied, “Reading the email the day we won.”
The Real World Design Challenge, sponsored by the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative and the Parametric Technology Corporation, provides high school students from participating states with access to world class professional engineering software and the opportunity to create viable solutions to real-world scenarios. This experience encourages students to not only learn the content knowledge but enhance their ability to reason and problem solve, which many education and business experts cite as a critical priority for America’s students.
Through the partnership with Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), all Pennsylvania schools, not just those participating in the Real World Design Challenge, have free access to the professional design software. PTC is offering up to $1 million in licenses to its Pro/ENGINEER (Pro/E) software platform at no charge. All a school must do to be eligible for the licenses is send at least one teacher to a low-cost training session to learn how to implement the program. Training classes are currently scheduled.
For more information on the Pro/ENGINEER software training, the Real World Design Challenge or the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative, visit www.pasteminitiative.org or contact Sue Mukherjee, State Lead, at smukherjee@state.pa.us.
