EDUCATION Mesa High duo smarter than the...

EDUCATION

Mesa High duo smarter than the average scientist

Students in Costa Mesa High School’s Mathematics, Engineering,

Science Achievement class bettered their better-educated competition

this month at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s annual Invention

Challenge Competition

“It’s not that we’re suddenly smarter than all the people who

built the Mars Rover,” said Steve Nelson, who teaches the class. “But

we’ve been doing this over and over. [The engineers] put theirs

together in a few hours and didn’t really test it.”

Measurement and repetition, he stressed, are the secrets of

effective engineering. Every student in his class designed a glider,

and a series of tests and constant practice helped hone their

prototypes.

This year’s JPL contest theme, “The Wright Turn,” celebrated the

100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight on Dec. 17,

1903. For the JPL flight, the gliders took off from a specially

designed launcher and had to make a right turn to land on a target 40

feet away.

Nelson’s class entered two nearly identical gliders, each about

one meter long. Seventeen-year-old Joseph Powers’ glider won the

preliminary competition, and 14-year-old Ted Lee’s won the finals,

landing 21 inches from the target, closer than the rocket scientists’

glider.

-- Marisa O’Neil