STEM STUDENTS UNDERWATER?

21 January 2011 by A. Jubaid and F. Begum

“MIT Sea Grant's new Sea Perch program introduces pre-college students to the wonders of underwater robotics. Part of the Office of Naval Research's initiative, "Recruiting the Next Generation of Naval Architects," this program teaches students how to build an underwater robot (called a Sea Perch), how to build a propulsion system, how to de-velop a controller, and how to investigate weight and buoy-ancy. This endeavor is one of many exciting new projects funded by the Office of Naval Research as part of its Na-tional Naval Responsibility Initiative. The initiative focuses on bringing academia, government and industry to work together to ensure that the talent needed to design the Navy's next generation of ships and submarines will be there when needed.” - Drexel Engineering Website
Sea perch means build your own Underwater Robot and other wet projects by Harry Bohn and Vickie Jensen, the sea search program was created by the MIT Sea Grant Col-lege Program in 2003 with the goal of generating interest in underwater studies. It is a good project for all of the stu-dents. They can have lots of fun to doing it. The first day of our sea perch program, we had lots of fun. We spent our time learning about the sea perch. We learn about lots of things we use everyday in our life. Actually sea perch is a robot you make to work under the water. We also can learn about work to done by other sea perch teams. The US NAVY uses sea perch robots to look at their work under water. Its also teaches us how people finished their work with the robot under the water. By doing this project we can know lots of engineering thing. This is a part of science and part of engineering. It is an awesome project for student’s who might want to be engineers someday. We can learn lots of things that will be useful in our career fields.
We will make this under water robot as a group and enter it in a local, regional, and possibly a national competition. We are working with the Drexel University community of stu-dents and staff, but will compete with other schools as well. There are teams from both middle schools and high schools in the Philadelphia area.
The Sea Perch program is a kit that allows stu-dents to simple construct a simple, remotely- operated un-derwater vehicle, or ROV, from PVC pipe and other readily available materials. There are many students involved in the project and the teachers that are mentoring our students are Ms. Kim, Mr. Sell, Mrs. Bess-Pashak, Ms. Silver, and Mrs. Sible.