West Potomac’s TSA team, the Technology Student Association, recently competed in a statewide competition in Hampton, Virginia, from April 30 to May 4, for a multitude of projects. TSA is a student-focused organization for high school students interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The association operates nationwide, with students from each state competing in a variety of areas including animatronics, architecture, drones and many more.
West Potomac’s TSA branch qualified for the state competition after the regional competition at Park View High School on February 28. West Potomac competed in nine different events, with three of them placing in the top three. These were animatronics, drone challenge and data analytics. Animatronic, drone challenge, transportation, and dragster projects are competing at nationals, despite transportation placing fourth.
“There were around 2000 students across the state of Virginia, and three of our nine projects placed, and now they are going to nationals,” Mr. Franco, TSA sponsor and Engineering teacher at West Po, said.
Projects were judged based on three factors, being the model, the presentation of the model, and the documentation explaining the model which was the largest weighted part of scoring, also being one of the more difficult factors.
“The documentation would have work logs, design processes, brainstorming, everything relevant to the project, and all the background behind it. It’s over half the points, so it’s very important to make the writeup perfect.” said Sean Collins, president of West Po TSA.
Students for each event were faced with different prompts for each category that they built their projects around. The time each project was worked on varied, with some projects, such as Animatronics, starting halfway through the year, and other projects still taking a couple of months to complete. These projects would not come without setbacks to be solved, such as with the construction of the transportation modeling project.
“We definitely experienced setbacks. We planned to have a part of our transportation modeling model spin, but at the last minute, it didn’t work, so we had to problem-solve at the last minute in the hotel room right before we submitted it,” Tina Copty, Vice President of West Po TSA, junior, said.
Despite facing issues and being under a time crunch, problems were quickly solved.
“We fixed it by having to solder batteries together to get the gravity wheel of our rocket model to spin,” Copty added.
All students who attended the competition enjoyed it, exemplifying how much they admired engineering talent from students all across the state.
“It was great to see people from other schools and see what their projects looked like, especially compared to our own, and seeing how engineering disciplines are different across the schools,” Hannah Golden, a member of West Po TSA, junior, said.
The National competition is taking place from June 23 to June 26, where West Po will show off their four highest achieving projects thus far, with hopes for another strong performance.
