Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), a statewide public cyber charter school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, recently announced that its Real World Design Challenge (RWDC) team of six students won this year's statewide competition, marking the 10th consecutive year of CCA capturing the state title. The RWDC was created to help build the United States' STEM workforce by providing high school students from across the country the opportunity to work on real-life engineering challenges in a collaborative, team environment.
The RWDC tasks students with a professional engineering challenge to design and implement unmanned aerial systems - more commonly known as drones - that will help solve modern-day issues faced by global industries. The 2020 challenge required students to design a drone that could carry and deliver packages weighing up to 5 kilograms, make continuous deliveries through a neighborhood, and complete its route with at least 20 minutes of battery life remaining.
When designing its drone, the team had to consider a variety of challenges, including power management, weight, and design efficiency. All designs were required to include upward-facing rotors, effectively reducing the battery life of the drone. To overcome this issue, the CCA team designed a drone that takes off with rotors pointing upward, then switches to a hybrid airfoil for long-distance flight to conserve battery power.
CCA this year competed against student teams from schools across Pennsylvania. The students who were part of the CCA team include Alisher Aminov, grade 12, Lebanon; Bella Christianson, grade 10, Waynesboro; Kenya Mitchell, grade 12, Steelton; Luke Zimmerman, grade 10, Palmyra; Numayr McPhaul, grade 10, York; and Timothy Cribbs, grade 12, Camp Hill.
The team is currently preparing to represent Pennsylvania at the national competition on Saturday, April 25, in Washington, D.C. At the RWDC national competition in April, teams representing the U.S. and China will present their inventions to a panel of judges with careers in aerospace and defense. Since first participating in the national competition in 2008, the CCA team has twice finished in second place.
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