Flying Car Contest For High School Students Held This Weekend At The Museum

A record 69 teams from a dozen different local middle schools teamed up in the Fly Your Ride! STEM challenge flying car competition at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park this past weekend, and the contest continues today when 33 teams from nine different schools take center stage in the high school division beginning at 10 a.m.

Sponsored by SDG&E, the ISTAT Foundation, and the Kenneth T. & Eileen L. Norris Foundation, Fly Your Ride encourages students throughout Southern California to push the limits of their creativity and problem solving while engineering their own flying car.

A total of 320 teams entered Fly Your Ride this year, including 287 middle school (Grades 6-8) and 33 high school (Grades 9-12) teams from Southern California, the most since the competition’s inception in 2012.  In all, 426 students, including 355 in the middle school division and 71 in the high school division, submitted blueprints for Fly Your Ride.

The first place winner in the distance category in the middle school division was the team of Riley Hughes and Michael Taylor of Joan McQueen Middle School, setting a new Fly Your Ride record with a distance of seven and a half feet.  Sarah Kogelman and Christina Nguyen, both of Marshall Middle School, took second and third place, respectively.

The Creativity in Engineering award went to Lucas Vontsolos from Marshall, and Cassandra Ferguson, also from Marshall, received the Creativity in Design award.

Registration for the annual Fly Your Ride competition typically runs from December until the following January, followed by judging of the entries from January to March.  The Fly Your Ride finals at the San Diego Air & Space Museum happen each April to May. Each year, more and more teams from middle schools and high schools from the San Diego region and beyond enter Fly Your Ride.  School districts outside San Diego County have taken notice of the Fly Your Ride and have started creating similar competitions in their school districts.

(Image provided with San Diego Air & Space Museum news release)

FMI: sandiegoairandspace.org