Deadline nears for NMI teams to sign up for Design Challenge

The deadline to register for the Real World Design Challenge is this Friday, Nov. 18, 2011, midnight local time.

This competition is open to all public and private schools, all teachers or community members who’d like to coach a team, and any 9-12th grade student in the CNMI.

Every CNMI team that participates in the RWDC gets $1 million in professional engineering software along with training, curriculum materials, and access to mentors. Teams of 3-7 high school students use these resources to solve an engineering challenge that is currently faced by industry. Students first compete in a state level Governor’s Cup. The team with the best design from CNMI, Guam, and American Samoa gets an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. to compete against other states in the national finals in April.

The Real World Design Challenge 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. Student teams will be asked to address a challenge that confronts our nation’s leading industries. Students will utilize professional engineering software to develop their solutions and will also generate presentations that convincingly demonstrate the value of their solutions. The RWDC provides students with opportunities to apply the lessons of the classroom to the technical problems that are being faced in the workplace.

The competition’s goal is to sustainably increase the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. The partners are focused on working within the context of the American educational system to transform STEM education in the United States by providing professional science and engineering and learning resources to students and teachers.

The RWDC began in 2008 through a partnership between industry, government, academia, and non-profit. The partners were committed to bringing a program to schools that brought professional engineering resources into the classroom, was free to participate in, and could scale to every school in the United States. The partners brought together $263 million in resources and began working with governors to build an infrastructure of states to scale across the United States. The first year, ten states participated.

The Challenges have all been focused on the aerospace industry so far, but as the RWDC grows, we will add other content areas as well. We are constantly looking for new partner organizations, states, and school teams to participate.

More information can be found on www.realworlddesignchallenge.org or by contacting the RWDC State level coordinator Jeaniffer Cubangbang at 237-3014 or jeaniffer.cubangbang@cnmipss.org. (PR)