Aeronautical Dolphins is Pacific RWDC champion

Marianas High School’s Aeronautical Dolphins was once again the big winner in this year’s Real World Design Challenge.
The seven-member team was hailed champion in both the state and Pacific competitions, earning the privilege to fly to Washington, D.C. and compete with teams from the rest of the nation.

The Aeronautical Dolphins was the 2013 RWDC national champion and will defend the title in November.

This year’s group is composed of Jill Ann Arada, the team’s project manager; Jessica Bigueras, marketing specialist; Alam Mobtasim, design engineer; Jun Young Kim, simulations engineer; Regina Go, systems and test engineer; Roselie Agulto, mission planner; and Esther Choi, the team’s mathematician.

The RWDC competition’s challenge this year was to design and implement an unmanned aircraft system, or UAS, to support precision agriculture, specifically the monitoring and assessment of crop conditions to achieve increased yield. The teams were asked 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.

The Aeronautical Dolphins’ 77-page entry this year is dubbed “The HawkEye 670,” a small, unmanned aerial system.

According to veteran team member Arada, the group worked six months to ensure that what they will turn in is a professional-type design notebook. In her three years in the competition, she is confident of the CNMI chances in keeping the national title for another year.

“With the experience I gained and shared with other team members, we will come out stronger. I can say the team is more organized, ideas are more complex, and our design book is professional,” said Arada, who is also a recipient of the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholarship this year.

She will pursue biomedical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology after high school.

Fellow veteran member Jessica Bigueras expects the team to once again bring honor to the islands. “We’re more knowledgeable about our design and we will do our best to bring back our name on the top,” she said.

This year marks the third participation of the CNMI in the national RWDC competition. It was able to bag the championship trophy on its second year, besting entries of 50 other states in the nation. Since then, the CNMI team had been gaining the respect of other teams in the mainland, which now considers the island group as one of their biggest competitors.

For Aeronautical Dolphins coach John Raulerson, “The HawkEye 670” is truly a byproduct of the students’ hard work whom he credited for waking up as early as 3am in the last six months just to take part in webinars. “We just put a lot of time and efforts on this and we expect to win!” he told Saipan Tribune.

MHS principal Cherlyn Cabrera was equally proud of the Aeronautical Dolphins’ latest achievements. Cabrera said the countless hours put in by the team are a testament to their hard work. She promised the school’s full support in every step of the way.

On Friday, the champion team was awarded a plaque of recognition by Board of Education chair Herman T. Guerrero and Education Commissioner Dr. Rita A. Sablan in recognizing the team’s three years of achievements in the RWDC competitions.

Other winners

According to Jeaniffer H. Cubangbang, M.Ed, RWDC state coordinator and STEM fair coordinator, the winners in the recently concluded State RWDC competition are: MHS’ Aeronautical Dolphins, first place; Mount Carmel School’s KON-52, second place; MCS’ Aviator Knights, third place; MCS’ Agri-Drone Knights, fourth place; and MCS’ Knightfly, fifth place.

For the Pacific RWDC, the second and third placers are Guam Islanders from John F. Kennedy High School and Mount Carmel School’s KON-52 respectively.

Champions of the national competition will each receive $50,000 college scholarships. Arada and Bigueras, who were members of the winning 2013 National RWDC, already have $50,000 scholarships and will be competing once again.

One of the judges, Ms. Del Rosario, had this to say: “This is my third year of judging the annual Real World Design Challenge. Each year is a whole new experience with grand enthusiasm for me as I read through the notebooks of our future scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technology experts. I applaud the participants and RWDC for continuously promoting the importance of STEM education and programs within our schools.”