Students compete in Bi-County STEM Challenge

For the past six years, the Bi-County Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Challenge has been providing middle school and high school aged students with the chance to put their STEM skills, but more importantly their collaboration and communication skills which always accompany the application of STEM, to the test.

On Tuesday, Nov. 3, Lind-Ritzville’s STEM club brought their team to the Bi-County STEM Challenge.

The team consisted of six members, Hawk Busayok, Emily Rosen, Jack Anderson, MicKayla Hall, Emma Aldrich, and Caroline Erikkson, all of who contributed differently to the team.

Schools from all across the Bi-County were represented, including Odessa, Harrington, Wilbur, Creston and Sprague.

Each year the Bi-County STEM Challenge consists of two smaller challenges.

The initial, shorter challenge sees the team members divided up and regrouped into pairs with students from other teams. The pairs are presented with an engineering challenge that stresses the communicative and innovative nature of STEM.

The majority of the day is spent overcoming the second challenge; teams from each school are faced with a challenge they must work together to overcome, in hopes of outlasting other teams.

Each year the theme is different, but every year teams are forced to be inventive, creative and resilient.

Lind-Ritzville High School’s STEM club advisor Jason Aldrich explained, “The purpose is to give kids the opportunity to use their knowledge and skills that they learn in school and apply it to a fun type [of] competition.”

All of the science teachers from the Bi-County get together to plan the competition. Aldrich continued, “My favorite part is the planning stage. I enjoy the collaboration the science teachers and the Professional Learning Community take to develop the competition—we create it.”

This year’s team challenge had teams construct a machine prior to the day of the event that could launch a softball-sized object 15 feet in the air. When the machines were launched at the event, the projectiles symbolized a rocket launching to Mars.

The recent book-to-movie production, “The Martian”, a novel by Andy Wehr and a film starring Matt Damon, inspired the competition.

Two team members acted as the astronauts, two acted as mission control and the remaining two acted as the satellites. Students were challenged to help the stranded Martian astronauts safely return to Earth by overcoming a series of obstacles.

“We kind of try to mix it up,” Aldrich said, regarding the theme of the challenge, “keeping in mind what we did last year and the orientation of the competition… In each competition we try to make sure we get each of the cornerstones covered, because that’s the way STEM works.”

In reality, aspects of STEM are constantly intertwined, with science dependent on technology, technology dependent on engineering and all of them dependent on math.

The Bi-County STEM Challenge was enjoyable for the students.

Hall said, “I think my favorite part was seeing everyone’s launchers... I learned that good communication is needed to have a good team.”

Anderson added, “My favorite part was probably trying to guide Hawk while he drove the rover,” which was a remote controlled car that ‘mission control’ drove blindly with the help of their teammates.

“I wanted to compete and learn something new that I didn’t know and experience something I haven’t tried before,” said Rosen. “I learned teamwork is especially important… In order to succeed you have to work together and plan.”

Erikkson concluded, “My favorite part was to solve the mathematical and scientific questions so we could continue to the next level of the challenge and get closer to the goal. I learned that communication can be very hard but still very important.”