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education
Peoria High School MESA team brings home 3rd place at nationals
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The Peoria High School MESA team took home 3rd place at the USA national competition.
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The Peoria High School MESA team received 3rd place in the nation in the Poster Symposium aspect of the MESA USA national competition.
The team attended the MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition in San Diego.
Their project won the Arizona state competition in May that qualified them to represent Arizona at nationals.
Corona Annala, Magdalena Annala, Leah Bucher, and Evan Lyda took home the honor for their project, "See the Sea."
The team had to discuss and demonstrate their project to judges, spectators and other competitors.
They designed and created a prototype "interactive water table toy" to assist in therapy and entertain young children with visual impairments. This was the culmination of 10 months worth of work.
Peoria High School MESA Program Advisor David “Skinny” Hill said the students did an outstanding job.
"I can't tell you how proud I am of these four Panthers in how they represented themselves, Arizona MESA and PHS! It was an awesome experience to share the time with them at NEDC and work with them this year," he said.
MESA - Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement - is a nationally recognized program that engages educationally disadvantaged students, so they excel in math and science and encourages them to explore STEM fields and post-secondary degrees. The award-winning Peoria High MESA Program has been active for 32 consecutive years. This is the fourth team Peoria has qualified for MESA USA Nationals in the 20-year history of the NEDC.
The focus of the MESA NEDC project challenge was to identify an individual or group who experiences some type of inequity. The 2024 theme was “Designing for Equity Locally to Affect Sustainability Globally.” Teams employed human-centered design principles to engineer a solution.
In June each year, middle school and high school MESA students from each participating state gather together to showcase their projects. In implementation of the engineering design process, they were required to complete four competition components:
1. Write a design proposal describing their client, inequity, and proposed solution.
2. Prepare an academic poster providing a visual overview of their project highlighting their problem, design process, prototype and results.
3. Prepare and present a technical pitch discussing an overview of their design process and demonstrating the functionality of their prototype.
4. Participate in a poster symposium to share their project, design process and prototype as well as answer questions from spectators and judges.
