Photo By Jermaine Sullivan | Pennsbury High School students pose with their first place trophy after winning the...... read more read more
Subscribe
The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division (NSWCPD) co-hosted the 6th annual Greater Philadelphia SeaGlide Challenge with Temple University’s College of Science and Technology at the Temple University Ambler Campus on May 17, 2023.
SeaGlide is an underwater robotics competition for middle and high school students in the Greater Philadelphia Area. Students completed a research paper and technical upgrade, product presentation and commercial, vehicle performance, circuitry and coding, and bug hunt.
“SeaGlide is very important to the overall NAVSEA [Naval Sea Systems Command] outreach program because it represents a jump from SeaPerch, which is a remotely operated vehicle, to SeaGlide, which is an autonomous vehicle,” NSWCPD Mechanical Engineer Kyle Verrinder said, kicking off the event. “It [SeaGlide] is a microcosm of the overall engineering design process that we deal with every day in the Navy. Hopefully, this is sparking interest in pursuit of more technical engineering challenges.”
NSWCPD sponsors similar events and additional initiatives to pique student interest in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields. However, due to the complexity of the SeaGlide Challenge, primarily only high schools enter this competition.
Southeast Delco middle school students Francis Sanoe, Christopher Navarra, and Caleb Spencer competed in their first SeaGlide competition this year as the only middle school team to do so.
“We didn’t have any practice in coding so we had to go off the top of our heads. We only had two days of coding,” Sanoe said after the first SeaGlide event that focused on circuity and coding.
Although Southeast Delco didn’t win this event they are looking to do better in next year’s competition.
“We’re going to prepare more. We didn’t have a PDF for all of the code,” said Navarra in explaining plans for next year’s competition. (Students are allowed to prepare a PDF document of notes, such as circuit diagrams and code snippets, to help them complete tasks for the event.)
Adam Wechsler, a NSWCPD data scientist and SeaGlide circuitry and coding judge, spoke about the event experience.
“Something that I liked to see was that discussion was happening. I didn’t see any groups where one person was doing everything while two other people watched. A lot of them had a problem and then I got to see them discussing,” Wechsler said.
Next up was the pool event, which in previous years was conducted in an indoor pool to limit the outside variables on the underwater glider. However, as the Temple University Ambler campus pool is outside, that provided a myriad of challenges for the students.
“We’re at an outdoor pool, which has created some interesting challenges with wind and currents. Normally, we turn off all of the pool pumps and everything within the pool. We try to make the water as still as possible. Obviously, with the wind we can’t get around that … ,” NSWCPD’s STEM Outreach Program Manager and SeaPerch/SeaGlide Director Tristan Wolfe said.
Steven Rao and Judson Lin, students from STEM-UP, the NSWCPD-sponsored afterschool program in collaboration with Temple University, had some issues with their underwater glider moving forward.
“Maybe we should’ve made the wings a little bit straighter like a fighter jet,” said Rao in considering if a different wing modification would’ve worked.
“One thing that was hard was watching the bot kind of move and then get stuck,” Lin said, adding that he and Rao plan to do more testing before next year’s event.
Lastly, was the Bug Hunt event, which required students to troubleshoot a virtual project that included both a simulated microcontroller circuit and a program. The project was broken in many different ways, and students had about 90 minutes to correct as many problems (bugs) as they could.
Greg Anderson, a NSWCPD mechanical engineer and a bug hunt event judge, spoke about the difficulties some of the students had during the event.
“They get spun up on having to fix a specific problem instead of setting it aside and seeing what else is out there. What are some of the easier bugs to find? When you find a bunch of the easier bugs then maybe you get a clue as to something else that isn’t working,” Anderson said.
SeaGlide’s winners were as follows:
White Paper & Technical Upgrade Challenge
First – Pennsbury High School
Second – STEM-UP Leadership Experience Program
Presentation / Commercial
First – Pennsbury High School
Second – George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science
Bug Hunt Challenge
First – Academy Park High School
Second – Pennsbury High School
Circuitry and Coding Challenge
First – Academy Park High School
Second – George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science
Pool Performance
First – Southeast Delco School District
Second – Academy Park High School
Overall Winner
First – Pennsbury High School
Second Academy Park High School
After the competition, students were shown several engineering labs at the campus.
NSWCPD employs approximately 2,800 civilian engineers, scientists, technicians, and support personnel. The NSWCPD team does the research and development, test and evaluation, acquisition support, and in-service and logistics engineering for the non-nuclear machinery, ship machinery systems, and related equipment and material for Navy surface ships and submarines. NSWCPD is also the lead organization providing cybersecurity for all ship systems.
| Date Taken: | 06.02.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 06.02.2023 08:02 |
| Story ID: | 445994 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 147 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, NSWCPD and Temple University Co-Host 6th Annual Greater Philadelphia SeaGlide Challenge, by Jermaine Sullivan, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
United States Navy
