On Saturday, May 18, 2024, ten student teams from Olympic Peninsula communities met at Forks Athletic and Aquatic Club to compete at the Olympic Coast MATE ROV Competition. This annual event, hosted by NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, encourages students to learn and apply science, technology, engineering and math (S.T.E.M.) skills as they develop underwater robots – also known as remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) – to complete missions based on real-world issues and events. This year, participating teams included students from Forks Middle School, Lake Quinault School District, Neah Bay High School, and Quileute Tribal School.

This year’s contests highlighted the roles ROVs play in support of underwater marine industry, managing healthy waterways, and locating and monitoring species using acoustic data. Additionally, teams were asked to build and operate their own vertical profiler to monitor real-time temperature changes.

Throughout the competition, students were tasked with completing product demonstrations in the pool with their robots as well as creating team companies and working together to manufacture, market and “sell” their team to the judges. This simulated company approach promotes the development of entrepreneurship and leadership skills, as students manage their project and budget, prepare marketing displays and deliver engineering presentations, all of which may be necessary in future careers.

Following the day-long competition, an awards ceremony was held to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of the student teams. Teams can compete in one of two competition classes at the Olympic Coast Regional, Scout or Navigator. Scout class is where most new teams start their journey and Navigator is the next step, with more pool challenges and the need for increased communication skills as ROV pilots are only allowed to navigate the course through a video feed via a camera on their robot.

This year, team “Turtle Frogs” from Lake Quinault School District took a landslide first place in Scout while in Navigator class, “The Cleanup Crew”, took first providing their 12th-grade teammates a long-time-coming and well-deserved final season. The Mentor of the Year award was selected earlier this year during the Student ROV Build Workshop and voted on by the Olympic Coast ROV mentors themselves.

Kim Kearns from Forks Middle School was selected by her fellow mentors for this recognition due to her unconditional willingness to support not only her own students but fellow Olympic Coast mentors and teams. Judges at the 2024 Olympic Coast MATE ROV competition appreciated listening to Kim give her teams a pep talk before their big day, reminding them all that, “… rule one is to just breathe, rule two is check the fuse!”.

Olympic Coast MATE ROV Competition is supported by local sponsors, including NOAA Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, North Pacific Coast Marine Resource Committee and Surfrider Foundation Olympic Peninsula Chapter. Local professionals and community members volunteer as judges for the competition, evaluating the students’ ROVs, marketing poster displays, and engineering presentations.

The Olympic Coast MATE ROV Competition is one of more than 36 regional contests held around the world and managed by the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) and Marine Technology Society (MTS).