BILLINGS — Six students from the Career Center in Billings are heading to Houston for the finals of a nationwide NASA competition after designing engineering projects to scale for outer space.
The competition, called High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) features different aerospace engineering competitions, where students apply their skills to real-life space scenarios.
Click here to meet the students:
The six finalists are composed of two groups of three. The first group includes sophomore Asher Kennedy, sophomore Isaac Augustine, and junior Torin Sieminkski in their efforts to build a robot that could jump and rebalance itself on the moon.
"We were tasked with making a lunar jumping robot for the moon," Kennedy said.
The second group includes senior Patrick Tidwell, sophomore Justin Newell, and sophomore James Nazarian who earned recognition building a space garage to the scale of a baseball.
"We were tasked with finding a safe and controlled space for the astronauts to unload their supply pods," Tidwell said.
Engineering teacher Eric Anderson said the competition gives students a taste of what a potential career path in engineering could look like.
"This is a really good opportunity for kids to actually utilize their engineering skills that they are learning in the classroom," Anderson said. "They're not all going to go into aerospace engineering but these projects apply to every field of engineering."
Anderson said the experience teaches students about success and failure.
"It teaches them how to utilize the design process," Anderson said. "When something doesn't work the first time, you go back and redesign and recreate."
Anderson noted that while he was proud of the two teams that qualified for the finals, he was impressed with the fact that all five of his teams made the finals or semifinals list this year.
"This year was unique in the sense that all five of our teams made the finals or semifinals list, which is pretty exceptional," Anderson said. "We've never had that amount of success before so I'm really proud of all of them."
For the students who qualified for nationals, it was a nice reward for a year's worth of hard work.
"I was really surprised," Tidwell said. "I mean, there was a lot of great competition in Bozeman, so I was surprised that our project did so well."
The two groups of students are staying busy, and will now have until April 28 to make any modifications and preparations for their final presentation against the nation's best.
"Now we have about a month and a half to redesign this and make it in its final form," Kennedy said.
