TRAVERSE CITY -- With the ink barely dry on their diplomas, three Traverse City Central High School graduates took their remote operated vehicle to a prestigious international competition.
In late June, Brian Tiefenbach, Jacob Schaub and Matt Madion and two parent coaches headed to San Diego to participate in the 2008 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center's International Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition. The trio qualified in April at a regional event held in Alpena where they debuted their underwater robot. A team from Alpena also qualified for the international event.
The Traverse City Area Public Schools SCI-MA-TECH program sponsored the team, which also received a grant and support from the Convergence Education Foundation. Advisor Keith Forton, a physics teacher at the school, guided team members -- plus 27 other students on seven additional teams in the district -- all year but was unable to attend the competition.
Forton, who created an ROV Wednesdays after school club for the teams to tinker and build their vehicles, launched the initiative three years ago. Schaub was an original member and he teamed up with Madion and Tiefenbach two years ago.
In a state and region surrounded by water, Forton believes that ROV building is a perfect fit for students and the community.
"This has been a great fit for the community, we're so marine based," said Forton, who envisions Michigan as the No. 1 ROV maker in the state.
Looking ahead, Forton has set another ambitious goal for his next crop of ROV creators: "We'd like to be the first high school team to cross the 200 foot [depth] line."
Central's ROV team came in 14th place overall out of a field of 26 teams from around the world, many of which had participated multiple times at the event.
With the three headed to college now each to study engineering -- Madion to the University of Michigan, Schaub to Michigan Tech and Tiefenbach to Purdue -- their four-day excursion provided a taste of real-world engineering and a jump on college studies.
"My engineering class at University of Michigan is building a ROV so I've got a little bit of a head start," noted Madion.
MacGyver-esque fixes and upgrades in their hotel room provided some high-adrenaline moments during the trip. The team discovered when running the vehicle in the pool at Scripps Institute of Oceanography that test runs in the Grand Traverse Bay were not the same.
They put the vehicle in the pool and it would not sink. So in four hours the team made fundamental changes in the propulsion system to solve the problem.
"The highlight was rebuilding our ROV in a crunch amount of time before we had to go out again and compete," said Tiefenbach. "We rebuilt it successfully and completed our mission."
Another issue the team grappled with arose from a modification made the night before they shipped the vehicle to California.
"We added more tether and that diminished the power and we lost a lot of energy -- we found out the first time we did the mission," Schaub said.
In terms of raw engineering and mission tasks, the team noted that they ranked in the top three or five.
The other side of any engineering project, explaining it via reports or visuals, turned out to be their biggest hurdle. The lower scores received in California could be attributed to both lack of motivation when the hands-on work was so exciting and not realizing how snazzy the other teams would make their written and visual presentations.
"Our downfall was the technical report," said Madion. "We knew everything about our ROV."
When it first formed, the small ROV Wednesdays group scrimped along with just a few students and virtually no budget. Working out of unused nooks and rooms at the school, they built vehicles using harvested parts from marine graveyards or barns. The students then tested their creations in a cattle feed trough.
Last year, Forton met with and successfully pitched a proposition to the Convergence Education Foundation's board of directors. Suddenly the program exploded and Forton wound up taking five teams to the 2008 regional competition in Alpena. Even with some modest funding, Central's ROV had the second lowest cost at the international event.
"The message here is not about money but people and we provided a catalyst here," said Joe Ziomek, chairman of the foundation's board of directors. "Our goal is to increase both math and science vocations of students, to stimulate kids interest so they pursue degrees in those fields."
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