Five teams from Georgetown ISD have qualified to participate in the national SeaPerch competition this year. The program is an underwater robotics competition that has only been offered in the district for the past two years.

The 28 students from Ford Elementary, Benold and Forbes middle schools and East View and Richarte high schools qualified during regional competitions held in Georgetown on Feb. 20 and in Dallas on April 5. The teams will move on to the national competition, which will be held at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in May.

The students are part of SeaPerch, a national robotics program that teaches students to build underwater remotely operated vehicles, or ROV. The program is funded by the Office of Naval Research as part of the National Naval Responsibility for Naval Engineering initiative and is meant to teach students about science, engineering, technology and math, or STEM.

Students build the vehicle from a kit that consists of low-cost, easily accessible parts and follow a curriculum that teaches basic engineering and science concepts with a marine engineering theme. The students use their vehicle to complete underwater tasks, and they are required to create a poster that explains the scientific concepts behind the vehicle and defend their knowledge in an interview, said Amy Supak, an advisor for the Ford Elementary School team.

She said it took her students about 10 weeks to build their vehicles. While the building process could be condensed into a few days, she said she wanted to make sure the students understood all the scientific concepts.

“You kind of take it slow so that you can talk about why they’re doing it and make sure they understand, so they’re not just following directions,” she said.   

The students learned how to cut polyvinylchloride, or PVC, pipe, wire together a motor, drill holes and solder a circuit board. As they moved further along in the process, the students tested their vehicles and then made modifications, Supak said.

Since there is no category for elementary students, Supak’s fifth-graders competed in the junior high school category. Ford Elementary School student Luke Gerdes, the driver for his team, said he joined the SeaPerch program because he thought it would be fun to be a part of something that was so interesting.

“It was really fun,” he said. “If you one day want to be an engineer, this could be the kind of thing for you. If you’re into building robotics, this could be good for you.”

Kelly Spillar, an advisor for the SeaPerch team at East View High School, said his students each took on different tasks while they were designing their vehicle to balance out the amount of technical information they took in.

“As they get ready for presentations, some of them are specialists in buoyancy, some are specialists in drag, some are more electrical specialists,” he said. “It’s their job to do the research and come up with a plan that fits with everybody else’s plan on how we can modify and make our craft as fast as possible.”

The program is meant to generate students’ interest in STEM-related fields, and Spillar said it shed light on what STEM careers look like to each student.

“When you get them working on a task, they realize, ‘I might be a mechanical engineer, while the electrical engineer is equally important,’” he said. “They start to see how the different areas of STEM all work together on various projects.”

GISD has 50 teams from 15 campuses participating in the program.