The team from East High School, out of Denver Public Schools, placed 3rd with their design, the ADHD ReFocus Wristband, which addressed inequities of 1st-5th graders with learning disabilities, by helping students get refocused throughout the day, in a private, direct manner, instead of verbally in front of peers. A secondary objective for the project was making the classroom environment easier to manage for teachers.
East high school team members Ellison Mucharsky, Aidan Hodgin, Marcus Burnett, Oliver Mufic and advisor Joel Noble earned a national ranking, 3rd place overall and earning several placings in individual categories.
Nationals was the MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition, held virtually June 23-24, and hosted by New Mexico MESA.
The annual MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition theme for 2022 was Designing for Equity in Your Community, and asked students to find and create a solution to inequities in their communities. Eight high school and seven middle school teams from across the nation came together virtually to compete.
Teams worked with community clients to help identify an issue, research its causes and the inequities needing to be addressed, resulting in a human-centered designed solution.
Components of the statewide and national competitions included documentation of process through an engineering design notebook, technical interviews, creating a design brief and research poster, and a prototype pitch.
For the regional competition, Rocky Mountain MESA saw a total of 24 high school teams at its competition, held Saturday, April 30th at the Rocky Mountain MESA Jamboree. Attachment of those results. East High School team was awarded first place and earned a spot to go to nationals, and won third. Congratulations, Aidan, Oliver, Marcus, Ellison and teacher Joel Noble! Congratulations to all teams that participated (see below for all finishers).
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Started in 1983, Rocky Mountain MESA had provided and deployed STEM resources and college preparatory programming to middle and high schools throughout the state, with many volunteers from both Colorado School of Mines and the National Renewable Energy Lab, Rocky Mountain MESA took an 8-year hiatus and has now re-emerged, through the Mines/NREL Nexus, with these efforts starting in 2019. It is in its third proof-of-concept year, each year sees remarkable growth.
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Rocky Mountain MESA is a nonprofit organization functioning primarily as an out-of-school program working in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines. Through RM MESA, Colorado School of Mines hosts one of the ten MESA USA states in the country, preparing under-served and under-resourced middle and high students through STEM-focused educational opportunities. Nexus helps us engage these efforts with NREL.
The National Engineering Design Competition is an annual event that each MESA state takes a turn in hosting for two years, allowing students to network and learn about the opportunities in STEM education and careers around the United States. Colorado is yet to host.
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Rocky Mountain MESA would like to thank it’s more than 105 Jamboree student and teacher competitors, its 25 volunteer judges, and event support staff!
A very special thank you to the graduate student volunteers from Colorado School of Mines:
Student mentors that helped all year:
Lydia Meyer
Vu Nguyen
Jake Huang
Rachel Mow
Taryn Tucker
Sophia Robinson (undergrad)
Marisa Sandoval (undergrad)
Sarah Evans
Camille Amador
Helen Correll
Cara Clements
Nadira Surghani
Jamboree student volunteers:
Jake Huang
Rachel Mow
Sophia Robinson (undergrad)
Yamah Nabiyar
Farai Mazhandu
Connor Ray
Nadira Surghani
Sarah Evans
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Thank you to New Mexico MESA, for inviting us to participate in their state competition in 2020-21, which helped us prepare, and for hosting this year’s National competition for 2021-22.
To learn more about Rocky Mountain MESA visit https://nexus.mines.edu/rmmesa/
To learn more about MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition, this year’s teams and their solutions visit https://nedc-mesausa.org/
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With your help we can do more! Help us bring STEM educational programming to kids, and be able to reach even more underserved schools in Colorado, and beyond into the Rockies!
Donate to Rocky Mountain MESA!
Donation is easy through their Colorado School of Mines’ Foundation portal
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