MHS wins State Real World Design Competition

The Marianas High School Aeronautical Dolphins celebrate with teachers and parents their recent victory in the State Real World Design Challenge. (Dennis B. Chan)

The Marianas High School Aeronautical Dolphins have won for a fourth year in a row the Pacific Real World Design Competition.

The seven-member team is set to compete in Washington, D.C. in the national competition late this year.

The MHS team beat out Guam, American Samoa, and other regional schools in the state competition with their 35-foot wingspan design of a remote controlled plane named the “Skywalker.”

The winning team is made up of Ann Norcio, Edna Nisola, Masrur Alam, Jun Young Kim, Matthew Cao, Scarlet Chen, and Robert Malate.

Norcio, the project manager and a sophomore, said their aircraft system is designed to spill pesticide over crops without a pilot guiding it.

“That’s one of the challenges,” she said. “It’s a really big plane that has to fly itself.”

Norcio said they also made the plane but the design is what they submitted.

“For the past six months, the team has been coming in the classroom everyday after school and Saturdays and Sundays,” she said of their efforts.

The most important thing she learned was teamwork. “It was really hard for us to get together. We only have one veteran. So we had to take up the challenge.”

MHS principal Cherlyn Cabrera said their win is a result of hard work and effort.

“I’m so excited because having escorted the students last year [to Washington, D.C.], they were up against the best of the best in the whole nation and really the purpose of this project is to get students interested in science and engineering,” she said, adding that she hopes this inspires other students as well.

The group’s teacher, John Raulerson, echoed Cabrera, saying, “We just work hard.”

“We don’t know what our competitors are doing, so we make the competition on ourselves. We’ve been working everyday for the last four months. We’ve been working hard very diligently, and this is a product of our hard work.”

Moving forward, the team can expect the next challenge to be more difficult, with more designing needed, Raulerson said. The team will be working over the summer.

“Our goal is not just to be in Washington, D.C., but be competitive and also possibly bring that national championship back to the CNMI.”

The Aeronautical Dolphins won the national championship in 2013.

He said his students have “tenacity,” adding that some students can handle the work and some can’t. “But you are left with the last students standing, and they handle the workload. When we submitted our notebook, it was one minute before deadline. That’s how tenacious these students are. They want to get everything correct. Every ‘t’ crossed, Every ‘i’ dotted,” he said.