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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Student project a lesson in real life


Lakeland High School senior Sam VanDenBerg attends Riverbend Professional Technical Academy and was part of a team of students who built an underwater vehicle. 
 (Kathy Plonka / The Spokesman-Review)
Hope Brumbach Correspondent

It looks like a homemade torpedo.

Made from PVC pipe, powered by a 12-volt battery and hatched from the brains of North Idaho students, the device won 15th place at an international competition this summer.

The 4-foot-long, torpedo-shaped creation is an autonomous underwater vehicle. In layman’s terms, that’s a swimming robot programmed to sense and to respond to its environment, independent of external control.

A team of 10 high school students designed and fabricated the 35-pound submarine during the last school year as part of a class project at Riverbend Professional Technical Academy in Post Falls.

In July, three students and two advisers launched the contraption into testing waters at the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in San Diego. The annual competition is put on by the Association for Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Society International and the Office of Naval Research.

Twenty-seven teams from around the world – including from the ranks of Cornell University, MIT and Duke University – put their underwater vehicles to the test in a football field-sized pool during the five-day competition.

Riverbend’s group, the Northwest Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Fellowship, was one of three high school teams.

Timed trial runs required the submarines to thread gates, nudge buoys and drop to specified depths, according to the vehicle’s sensors and pre-programmed instructions.

After each round, the teams would “go back and tweak, tweak, tweak,” said Bern Gannon, the team’s adviser and an instructor at Riverbend.

The hands-on experience exposes students to real-life lessons: meeting deadlines, working under pressure, solving problems and cooperating with team members, Gannon said.

“It gets really real world,” Gannon said. That’s the goal of Riverbend, which offers technical and specialized courses to integrate career and academics. The academy is a consortium of the Post Falls, Lakeland and Coeur d’Alene school districts.

For Sam VanDenBerg, a Lakeland High School senior and the captain of the 2007 submarine team, the competition tapped into a host of skills: fabricating, programming, creativity and imagination.

“It’s something to put on your resume,” said VanDenBerg, 18, who plans to study mechanical engineering with a future career in aerospace design.

This was the fourth time Gannon led a high school team to the international submarine competition, but the program had lapsed for two years after losing a major business sponsor.

The 2007 submarine cost $12,000, which local sponsors helped cover.

“They’re expensive little toys,” Gannon said.

Now that the team has a working model, they can continue to refine it for next year’s competition, he said.

“I considered this year very successful. I think they’re probably even surprised at how much they accomplished,” Gannon said. “It’s something that will definitely build on itself next year.”