IWA Students Place First in Engineering Competition

Incarnate Word Academy seventh and eighth-grade students in Howard Ludlow’s Robotics classes recently participated in the 2018 Coastal Bend Engineering Competition at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi on Oct. 12.

The competition, sponsored by the Department of Engineering at TAMUCC, is held to give both middle and high school students an opportunity to compete against one another while trying to successfully complete the building and operation of an engineering task created by the university’s Electrical Engineering Department.

Students had to build two operational circuit boards and a telegraphic communication device operated by the boards. After completing the build, each team was divided into two groups and moved to opposite sides of the contest room. Teams were then timed in their ability to successfully communicate and translate a unique phrase from one of their boards to the other and return a different unique phrase.

With over 25 middle school teams in attendance, the first two rounds of the competition saw only six complete phrases successfully transmitted from one circuit board to the other with two of them completed by IWA students.

In the third tie-breaking round, IWA students were the first to successfully transmit the phrase and were awarded first place in the Middle School division.

“This event was not just a wonderful opportunity for our students to compete, but also to spend an entire day on a college campus at an event run solely by professors and students from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi,” Middle Level robotics teacher Howard Ludlow said.

After the competition, Angels were given a lengthy tour throughout the campus and ate lunch in the university’s dining hall.

Seventh graders who participated in the competition were Gabriel Armstrong, Eldon Cass, Paul McNiff, Christopher Nesheim and Diego Roberts.

Eighth graders who participated were Illyana Aguas, Geraint Ballenger, Andrew Beauchamp, Alek Brysch, Kollin Kern, David Matl, Jonah Montez, David Quintana and Austin Vu.