Travis hosts STEAM competition for local high schools

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Christian Conrad
  • 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – Travis Air Force Base, California, in partnership with the Solano County Office of Education, hosted a competition May 10 for young, enterprising high schoolers to showcase proposed solutions to real-world problems facing the base.
Named for Travis’ own innovation initiative, the “Phoenix Spark Challenge” allowed 49 students from the local community the opportunity to flex their genius on a set of three challenges currently facing Travis engineers.

“The point of the competition is to get kids excited about (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics),” said Staff Sgt. Cory Carlisle, 60th Operations Squadron air traffic controller and one of the competition’s developers. “Providing these students the freedom and resources to pursue their own ideas and nurture their passions is what the Phoenix Spark Challenge is ultimately about.”

The challenges required a comprehensive knowledge of STEAM with all three involving problems that intersected into each subject’s principles.

Below are the challenges’ official descriptions:

  • Airfield Lighting Check: Design a system that saves time by remotely and wirelessly checking the lighting on the runway.
  • Unmanned Aerial Systems: Design a system that can deny UAS, or drones, entry into Travis’ airspace.
  • Self-Driving Bus: Design a driverless vehicle capable of carrying 15 to 20 passengers with luggage from the Passenger Terminal to the Visitors Center.

Along with being a way to get students engaged in STEAM topics, the competition’s use of real-world problems is useful in instilling a sense of civic responsibility, said Lisette Estrella-Henderson, Solano County Superintendent of Schools.

“(An educator’s) charge is to prepare all students to be prepared for the world of work, to be engaged citizens and life-long learners,” said Estrella-Henderson. “Preparing students to succeed and thrive after high school requires teaching not just content knowledge, but also transferable skills and dispositions that enable people to take responsibility for their own lives and operate within a greater social context that requires us to be increasingly more innovative and entrepreneurial.”
Estrella-Henderson’s initial talks with Phoenix Spark founder, Maj. Anthony Perez, made the Phoenix Spark Challenge possible. She has long been a proponent for cooperative efforts regarding increasing the quality of education for Solano County, including Travis.

Growing up as a military brat, Estrella-Henderson knows what education means to the military.

“I remember attending 12 schools by the time I graduated high school,” she said. “I understand the challenges that military families face as they seek quality educational opportunities for their children wherever they may be stationed, especially given that 60 percent of the children in military families in the U.S. are school-age and the majority attend public schools throughout the nation.”

It was the impetus of providing a better education to those military students that first drove her to want to support the competition, she said.

“County offices of education are uniquely positioned to partner with the military to design and implement programs with a focus on alignment across the educational system in any given community,” she said. “This project with Travis exemplifies collaboration and partnership at a county-wide level; a regionalized approach that allows us to provide the opportunity to a larger number of military students regardless of which community they live in or which school district they attend.”

For Carlisle, the idea of a regionalized approach to innovation is what the Phoenix Spark Challenge represents; the genesis of a movement he hopes to see implemented in communities Air Force-wide.

“The world is moving towards this need for rapid innovation,” he said. “Technology is advancing at a break-neck speed and we need to acknowledge that and foster the ways to keep pace with it before we end up buried by it. It’s important for us to empower younger generations to voice their ideas and provide them the means and confidence to take the future in stride.”