Students Compete in Annual Underwater Robotics Competition

Nearly 100 middle school and high school students gathered at New Bedford High School Saturday to compete in the 5th Annual SeaPerch Derby.

The remote controlled underwater robotic competition is sponsored by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport (NUWC) and the Undersea Science and Engineering Foundation (USEF).

Twenty-three teams from New Bedford, Sterling, and Hyannis, MA and Newport, RI competed in three separate divisions: Middle School, High School and Open Class.

The competition is designed to promote excellence and interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education among high school and middle school students. Candida Desjardins, Director of Education Outreach at NUWC Division Newport, said it's STEM education at its finest.

"It reenforces simple skills like measurement and learning how to use power tools and then also delves into more complicated physics things like center of mass, center of gravity, understanding buoyancy and what effects it," said Desjardins.

Members of the Rogers High School (Newport) Open Class team were excited to be competing and having fun. They also see the competition as a way to get younger students involved in math and science.

"People being aware this is something they can do I think is very good, especially for later in life if you want to do a career in engineering or marine-biotics," said Julliana, one of the team members that said she wants to pursue studies in science.

Along with being a competition, it's also a learning experience for the students.

Bill Ferreira, a judge and member of USEF, says they're there to score the students, but also to provide a helping hand.

"If it's the older students, we let them figure out their own problems. If it's a younger student and we see something going wrong that they're not catching, we kind of slip into a coach mode and say 'Watch out for this'," said Ferreira. "No matter what they score, we always try to find something positive about what happened during the event to give them some positive feedback."

Top scorers from the competition will advance to the National SeaPerch Competition next May at Louisiana State University.