Combining science, math and fun

CHENEY – Most of the time when a teenager is glued to a TV monitor, it’s not necessarily a good thing.

For several hours last Saturday at Eastern Washington University’s pool, teenagers staring at TV monitors was a good sign, one of intensity and focus on the task at hand — fitting a small cap onto a traffic cone during one of the challenge courses at the SeaPerch Robotics competition.

Sponsored by the EWU American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Office of Naval Research, 65-80 middle and high school students in teams of 3-4 converged on the pool to demonstration skills not only in constructing underwater robots, but piloting the machines through three obstacle courses. The courses represented different types of underwater challenges individuals using actual robots might face, Newport Middle School and 4-H SeaPerch instructor Vickie Blanchet said.

A slalom course where robots were piloted through gates varying in height represented exploring underwater structures such as caves and shipwrecks, Blanchet said, while a second course involving removing rings from the limbs of a tree-like pedestal and then replacing them on top of the structure utilized skills in using robots to pick up items off the ocean floor.

The third and final course, fitting a cap onto a traffic cone, involved the robot’s operator only being able to see the cap via a camera/TV monitor set up as the cap dangled from the end of an arm attached to the robot. The challenge was inspired 2010’s explosion and rupture of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. Navy SeaPerch Program outreach coordinator and EWU engineering advisory board member Patrick Molvik said.

“They were one mile down, these are just four feet,” Molvik said in comparing the BP accident with the SeaPerch course. “But the problem is still the same — being able to accomplish a task with the tools at hand in the environment you’re in.”

Inspired by the 1997 book “How to Build an Underwater Robot and Other Wet Projects,” the SeaPerch program officially kicked off via a grant in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Navy picked up the program and since 2011, it has been managed by RoboNation, also called the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Foundation.

According to its website, SeaPerch’s goal is to provide a teacher/mentor setting for teaching a varied science curriculum that “follows basic engineering and science concepts with a marine engineering theme.” The program offers online training and kits to build underwater robots varying in price from $150 – $350, with grants available to help programs with limited funding.

“It brings a lot more low-income schools into robotics,” Molvik said, noting other dryland robotic programs can cost upwards of $10,000.

SeaPerch curriculum touches on many disciplines, ranging from physics to electricity, electronics, ergonomics, aspects of maritime engineering like buoyancy, ballast and propulsion, understanding torque and learning trade skills such as soldering. The program meets many national learning outcomes for science, and maps to the Common Core Curriculum, according to its website.

“It’s really up to the teacher how deep you go into the rabbit’s hole and learn,” Molvik added.

Molvik, who works as senior engineer at the Navy’s Acoustic Research Detachment in Bayview, Idaho, got into the SeaPerch program while working as a contractor at a facility in Maryland. When hired by the government and sent to Idaho, he teamed with Cheney Middle School science instructor Tammy Schrader about 10 years ago to get the program started locally.

Cheney School District’s Westwood Middle School sent six teams to Saturday’s competition, with Sacajawea Middle School on Spokane’s South Hill sending seven and Newport five. Liberty High School in Renton and the private Christian high school House of the Lord in Oldtown, Idaho, each sent two teams.

One of the members a Westwood team, seventh-grader Elsa Bertelsen, said they spent about 5-6 weeks working on their robot and a couple days practicing in the EWU pool prior to competition. The work was intensive, especially learning to drive the robot via the TV monitor on the cap course.

“It was so weird,” Bertelsen said. “You have to imagine where the rest of your boat is because you can only see the cap. And you rely on your teammates a lot.”

While the Westwood students got the brief use of a pool, others did not. Sacajawea team instructor Kim Taylor said her students practiced in a recycling bin filled with water.

“These guys spent some serious hours to get these (robots) working,” she said.

With the U.S. facing decline in engineering school graduates, instructors and potential engineering employers might take heart in the work and attention the students put into Saturday’s competition. They also might be happy in hearing Bertelsen’s reasons for joining a SeaPerch team.

“I love science and math and it looked science and math loaded,” she said.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].