Howard students engineer entry for Baltimore's Kinetic Sculpture Race

May 3—During the past several months, a strange, human-powered amphibious vehicle has been coming together piece by piece at the Applications and Research Laboratory in Ellicott City.

Built by a dozen seniors in the Systems and Project Engineering academy, the creation will become the first-ever Howard County Public School System entry May 6 in the East Coast Kinetic Sculpture Race Championship. Hosted annually by Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum, the race challenges entrants to build mobile works of art capable of traversing 15 miles of mud, sand, pavement and water around Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

"It's really cool that we had the opportunity to get [to work on] something so hands on," said Long Reach High School senior Chris Lopez, 18. "They trusted us enough to be like, 'Yeah, go for it.'"

The design features a canoe suspended between two custom-built chassis, propelled on land by four bicycles and in the water by hand-held paddles. Named "Patent Pending," the sculpture will be competing against 24 other entries, including a giant pink poodle and a 35-foot music-playing crocodile. In its own bid to stand out amid the colorful field, the ARL team selected Metallica's "Enter Sandman" as their racer's theme song.

"They said they'd play it as we entered the obstacles," said Michael LeVesque, 18, another Long Reach senior and program lead on the project.

The Applications and Research Laboratory is the county's career and technical high school with 13 career academies open to all juniors and seniors who remain based at their home schools for non-career classes and extracurricular activities. The academies are two-year programs that prepare students for college and entry-level employment across a variety of disciplines, from agricultural science and biotechnology to finance and animation.

"There's a uniqueness here that brings great value to Howard County," said engineering instructor Michael Zoltoski. "If a kid was at his home school, he wouldn't have this experience."

Zoltoski is in his first year of teaching at ARL after more than a three-decade career as an engineering researcher and later chief of the Army Research Laboratory's Lethality Division at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County. He knows firsthand the importance of a thorough design process, having helped develop improved armor for U.S. combat vehicles facing improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenade attacks during the Iraq War.

"I hope [my students] further develop their engineering mindset and they learn that to succeed you must fail many times," Zoltoski said. "I would say for every success I had a thousand failures."

Wilde Lake High School senior Finn Nalewaik had wanted to engineer objects his entire life and couldn't believe it when he found out the district offered a course that would let him solder metal.

"My son is one of those kids who's not a natural fit for just a traditional school system," said Nalewaik's mother, Tanya Collins. "The actual curriculums aren't really set up for kids who have that out-of-the box thinking."

Nalewaik, 18, has thrived at ARL and the systems engineering class has only reinforced his interest in pursuing mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering after he graduates. He hopes to file patents of his own one day.

"It was the only and first class I've ever voluntarily made time out of my day to go apply," he said. "I haven't regretted it one bit since."

Nalewaik's enthusiasm for the program is shared by many around the county and the state.

Last month, County Executive Calvin Ball announced $13 million in state pass-through funding would be used to renovate and expand the Applications and Research Laboratory in an effort to open up the career academies to even more students. With enrollment limited to about 1,500, the school annually has to put hundreds of students on its wait list.

The expansion is also driven by the Blueprint for Maryland's Future legislation, which requires districts to invest heavily in college and career readiness opportunities across the next decade. The county plans to add a Certified Clinical Medical Assistant pathway at ARL in the fall and a computer programming pathway for the 2024-25 school year.

Zoltoski lives next to the Kinetic Sculpture Race course in Baltimore and said that building an entry would be the perfect project for students to learn about systems engineering, which combines multiple disciplines in order to create complex systems, from bridges to fighter jets. The race presents a dizzying list of rules and requirements, like the width of a vehicle and how wet pilots can get.

"In my mind, this is an unsolvable problem," Zoltoski said of the race. "It's more about the challenge."

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Since December, the class has thrown itself into solving the unsolvable, drawing up blueprints and purchasing materials. Zoltoski even assembled a group of local engineering and physics professors to review the students' initial designs in order to simulate real-life industry review boards.

"We started with two different teams looking at two different concepts," said LeVesque, who will be piloting Patent Pending on Saturday alongside Lopez, Howard High School senior Tobias Yeager and Oakland Mills High School senior Ethan Aidam. "One was really complex, one was very simple. We kind of came to a middle ground."

In the days leading up to the race, the class will also be adding a crucial missing ingredient to their design — art. LeVesque said the vehicle will be adorned with decorations representing all of the career academies, such as wings for aerospace engineering and an old computer for cybersecurity.

For details on attending this year's Kinetic Sculpture Race, visit kineticbaltimore.com.