Broomfield High students win national engineering competition
Jul. 22—Four students from Broomfield High School traveled to New Mexico this spring, where they won the national Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement competition with their app designed to overcome language inequities faced by users of the local food bank.
"The competition is all about human-centered design. The goal is for students to be able to work in teams of two to four people to focus on some kind of inequity within the community. And then they have to design and create a prototype of a product that involves coding to address that inequality," said Susie Dykstra, the engineering club coach at Broomfield High School.
Dykstra, along with other mentors, worked with the four students — Ethan Dorman, Coleman Eschenbrenner, Landon Wood and Glori Erichson — to create an app for Broomfield FISH, the local food bank and resource center. The students brought home the national championship, including first place overall, second place for their technical presentation, first place for their design brief and third place for their prototype pitch.
"The main inequity we were trying to address was the language barriers in our community, and we built FISH an app. And the key feature is that it's translatable into five different languages. So, basically, anyone in our community can come in, use the app and they know how to get food for themselves," Wood said. Wood is a member of the engineering club.
"We basically asked ourselves, what is an inequity in our community we can help with? From there, the project went through many iterations and redesigns to get it right," Eschenbrenner said. "The whole time we're doing that, we're also building a prototype pitch and a presentation for the competition." Eschenbrenner is the team's robotics expert.
In addition to the engineering and coding process of designing the app, the students put together a series of reports and presentations to be judged at the competitions. The group created a poster presentation, a design brief, a prototype pitch and had to undergo an in-depth technical interview about the app.
"This year our mentor very much pushed our team to go and do it because she knows our team and how hard working every single one of us are. And she really, really likes this competition because it's about helping people in our community, and we were each able to go and know more about our community and really get involved," Dorman said. He has been in the club since his freshman year.
The Broomfield High team, along with 25,000 other students from around the country, spent months working on their projects. The students traveled to Albuquerque to represent Rocky Mountain MESA, the regional branch of MESA based out of the Colorado School of Mines.
"I think we ended up staying up until like 2 a.m. the night before the prototype pitch, just like going through it time after time," Erichson said. Erichson spends her time working with the Women's Empowerment Club and serves as co-president for the Future Business Leaders of America club.
"The students are all very talented. They're all very focused on trying to not only win the competition, but also I think they've taken it to heart that the competition is encouraging them to try and bring something better to the world, to use engineering to try and make improvements in the world. And I'm really proud of them for taking that bit to heart," Chris Keller, the engineering club's co-coach, said.
According to the students, the best part has been the sense of community they've gained through their work, and the resounding support they've received.
"A big part about this whole competition was just the sense of community. There was a lot of support not just from like our team itself, but from our actual engineering club as a whole. And it was just a really great thing to be able to do a competition like this with people who are basically my second family," Erichson added.
The four students said that things like scholarships and acceptance into top universities will be easier with a national championship under their belts, and all the students plan on continuing to pursue science or engineering after high school. In addition to personal endeavors, the engineering club will also benefit from the win, especially at a school mostly celebrated for its athletes.
"We've actually gotten a very surprising amount of recognition for it. So I think it's a really good thing not only for our engineering club, but also for our theater programs and that kind of thing — just like more recognition for things other than sports at our school," Eschenbrenner said.
In addition to their work with FISH, the students worked on apps for Boulder-based food banks Harvest of Hope and Community Food Share, and hope to have all the apps in both the Apple and Google stores soon.
"No matter what happens with this competition, we have been able to show that we are able to have an impact in our community. And with this, we hopefully not only have an impact in our community, but also in our state, country and maybe even the world," Dorman said.
