MESA Day catapult collection
04/25/2019 –
NM MESA Teams From Throughout New Mexico Compete in the 31st Annual MESA Day Competition
ALBUQUERQUE, NM: New Mexico MESA hosted over 400 attendees from schools across the state for the 31st Annual MESA Day statewide competition at the Albuquerque Convention Center on April 17, 2019. This year’s theme focused on “Food as a Grand Challenge“. Student teams qualified in order to attend the statewide event and hosted the Albuquerque Mayor First Lady, Liz Keller, and the Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Higher Education Department, Kate O’Neill as keynote speakers.
The day was filled with future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists engaging in the challenges listed below.
MESA Day Track
- On Site Science-Eatery Science Escape: Teams will address and solve food chemistry, food science and food packaging mysteries during this escape session designed to challenge and nourish the STEM students.
- On Site Math-Farmers Math: A Sum of the Real Dirty Work: Students share the learned food process and importance behind farming and agriculture by using a set of skills to be an effective farmer. Students will work in groups by investigating, reading data, calculating, and performing related tasks to solve real world farming and agriculture problems.
- Prepared Design-Fly Over Operational Food Delivery System: Teams will design, build and launch a Delivery System Device that deliver “food supply” (confetti egg) to a given target. Teams must also design and build a Delivery Package for safely transporting the egg.
- On Site Engineering-Bring Your Own Junk: Teams will be tested on their building skills by requiring them to bring junk items needed to build a device that will carry out certain tasks and testing their tasks.
MESA USA Track
Teams competed in 4 sections: Technical presentation & interview; Project Report (submitted before the event); Poster & Symposium; and Prototype Pitch. Arduino Based Solutions for Humans asks students to implement the Human-Centered Design approach to find a client in their community who has a need, engineer a solution for this need using Arduino as the key component, and present their solution and recommendation(s) for next steps.
Congratulations to all of our participating teams and to our 2019 NM MESA State Champions!
- High School MESA Day Track: Centennial High School; Las Cruces, NM
- Middle School MESA Day Track: Belen Middle School; Belen, NM
- High School MESA USA Track: nex+Gen Academy – Team Alpha; Albuquerque, NM*
- Middle School MESA USA Track: Chaparral Middle School – Team Biddle Products; Chaparral, NM*
*The MESA USA Champions will represent New Mexico MESA in the 2019 National Engineering Design Competition held June 19-21 in Tucson, Arizona.
