NKSD technology students drive and dive ROVs.
POULSBO — The North Kitsap community pool was no longer a swimming haven on Tuesday. Instead it was a deep sea, Submersible Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) challenge testing ground.
Kingston and North Kitsap high schools’ Intro to Engineering and Design students began designing and building ROVs at the beginning of April and Tuesday marked the culmination of the ROV unit for KHS. Wednesday was NKHS’s challenge day.
To polish off the unit the ROVs had to maneuver five challenges.
Among the challenges: dive and drive to the bottom and back to the top, locate and recover O-rings, maneuver in and out of a structure, follow a path with limited visibility and pick up a heavy object with a hook.
About 50 KHS students eagerly leaned over the pool’s edge, watching as the ROVs’ brilliant orange propellers began to spin and the devices took on lives of their own.
With calculated diligence the students maneuvered the alien-looking, PVC-pipe constructed ROVs up and down, forward and backward and in and out of structures.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all year long,” said KHS junior and ROV designer Kimo Mackey. “We were introduced to ROVs at the beginning of the school year and we were all looking forward to it and then we were told the unit wouldn’t be until April. So we’ve been waiting a long time to do this.”
The students didn’t learn of the challenges until it was test time, but KHS design instructor David Leinweber planned it that way, as it makes the projects more lifelike. And creating real-world situations is the crux the class.
“One of the keys to this unit is it gets kids into contact with people who are engineers,” Leinweber said, “and hopefully we expand their (students) views of the careers that are available to them.”
The unit kicked off with a classroom visit from Navy volunteers who talked about how ROVs are used in the real world. A slew of electrical and other engineers assisted in the classroom with wiring and construction.
Albeit a simulation, it was as close to life as possible, and the students tackled procedures they’d never confronted before.
During the course of the unit they learned about buoyancy, water displacement, flotation, water environments and how to design, build, wire and operate an ROV.
The students worked in pairs to build the ROVs, and had to do some tinkering and tweaking of the ROVs to get them just right, especially the wiring.
The KHS sophomore duo of Amanda Reeves and Rachel Burk had never wired anything before, but found themselves hooking wires to motors, while keeping everything clear of the propellers, then soldering the wires to the male adaptor and wiring everything to the control box, which was “a tangled mess for a while.”
“We didn’t label our switch box very well so we had some trouble going forward and turning,” Reeves said. “Wiring was a big challenge, but eventually I got it.”
A partnership between Kitsap County school districts, the U.S. Navy, Navy contractors, the Naval Undersea Museum Foundation and Underwater Admiralty Sciences made the ROV unit a reality for its second year.
Susan Crawford, executive director of the SEA program at the Naval Undersea Museum Foundation and master organizer of the ROV event, said it’s the teacher’s job to prepare the students for the experiments. Everything else was the Navy agencies’ responsibility.
Crawford said they acquire all the materials and funding for the unit in addition to lending physical help. On Tuesday about 20 Navy volunteers, and a few deep sea divers, assisted the students with the challenge.
She said the Navy is involved because the nation needs more engineers.
“We are short engineers,” Crawford said. “If there’s a kid sitting in a classroom that might have this ability and never thought ‘I want to do this for a living,’ we might turn a light on for that kid, so let’s do this.”
Crawford said some students have changed their career path to engineering after the ROV experiment and that makes the Navy’s involvement, “so worth it.”
The ROV-builders learned a lot more than science applications during the course of the unit. They learned about team work, time and project management and how to handle failure: All real-life skills.
“When we ran into problems we had to fix them and learn how to deal with that,” Burk said. “We know we can ask for help and we know there are people around who can help us when we need it.”
The Navy agencies assist five Kitsap high schools — Bainbridge, KHS, NKHS, Central Kitsap and Olympic — with the ROV unit, and Tuesday was also the kick-off of the Navy’s ROV season. Crawford said the season began on a strong note.
“I think it’s going very well today,” she said. “I think we’re really off to a great start.”
Crawford is not alone in her thoughts. “It was really fun,” Mackey said. “It was like putting Legos together. Driving ROVs is kind of like a video game.”
