Congratulations to Leesburg High School teacher John Raulerson and his team of Engineering and Design students, including one from Leesburg, one from Lake Minneola High and several from Oak Ridge High in Orlando, who recently won the Florida Real World Design Challenge.
As state champions, the students have been invited to compete in the RWDC National Challenge Competition in April in Washington, D.C., with other state winners from around the country.
“You demonstrated innovation by experimenting with the unfamiliar, challenging familiar processes and methods, pushing the limits of current team thinking and adapting or creating tools/processes to increase efficiencies in your design,” wrote RWDC founder Ralph K. Coppola, Ed.D., in a letter of congratulations to the team. “Now you have the opportunity to build on your achievement and go even farther by competing in the National Challenge.”
The Real World Design Challenge is an annual competition that provides high school students the opportunity to work on real-world engineering challenges in a team environment. Students use professional engineering software to develop their solutions and generate presentations that convincingly demonstrate the value of their solutions. The RWDC provides students with opportunities to apply the lessons of the classroom to the technical problems that are being faced in the workplace.
The state champions are Ngoc Minh Thu Nguyen of Leesburg High School, Sydney Damas of Lake Minneola High School, and Gedeon Gueron, Joseph Nguyen, Daniel Andujar and student researchers Dylan Acevedo and Isys Navarro all of Oak Ridge High School in Orlando.
