By Viviam Liao
Staff Writer
Apprehensive silence filled Troy High School’s aquatic stadium as sophomore Steven
Lee carefully controlled the team’s ROV through the twists and turns of the obstacle course as
his team, sophomores Leilany Garcia, Bright Xu and Linda Yang watched intently from behind.
This was just a part of the 2024 SeaPerch Season Regional Competition on Feb. 24 and they
earned an honorary award for best team spirit.
SeaPerch is a hands-on engineering program that focuses on teaching students the
basic principles of science, engineering, technology and design. Students that enter the
program construct a working ROV prototype and test it during the competition against other
student groups.
“Typically, you’d take around like six or five months to build the ROV prototype, but since
I wanted to get a feel for it early on, I built it in one month,” Garcia said. “It was quite the
challenge, but we were able to build our prototype and take it to competition.”
Garcia is the captain and head engineer of the project and she manages all the team’s
meetings, budget and marketing. She has three other team members; Lee, the electrical
engineer, dealt with soldering and the controls, Xu, the mechanical engineer, handled the
mechanics and troubleshooting of the prototype and Yang, the presentation designer, created
the team’s design report and presentation.
The competition consisted of two main parts: the presentation and ROV showcase.
During the presentation, students present their technical design report and describe the design
process of their ROV. The report must include instructions to the ROV design and specific steps
taken to modify the ROV to compete in the SeaPerch Mission Challenge pool course. The ROV
showcase consisted of several obstacle courses that the students’ ROV must surpass and a
mission challenge in which the ROV must complete a series of tasks.
SeaPerch provides a ROV kit and a building manual for students. It is up to the students
to fix any trouble shooting problems and enhance their design. Since this was the first year they
participated in SeaPerch, the team was part of the stock class, meaning that they had a set list
of materials that they needed to purchase as well as a manual guide to build a basic structure
for their ROV.
“Since we started in December while everybody else started in August, we had a rough
start,” said Lee. “But everything worked out in the end and I really enjoyed it, even though it was
my first time and I had no experience.”
Garcia plans to make the SeaPerch experience an official club next year, allowing
interested students to join.