Maggie Walker’s Engineering Club, sponsored by Ms. Heather Kemmerly, entered the National Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM Competition and was named one of the 300 state finalists. According to Samsung Newsroom, the Solve for Tomorrow Competition is a competitive program that “challenges public school students in grades 6-12 to explore the role science, technology, engineering, and math can play in addressing some of the biggest issues in their local communities.” When sharing how the club first identified an issue in the Maggie Walker community to tackle, club member Brielle Bugauisan said, “the original designer of the issue discussed how their personal experience of the difficulties of joining into clubs and making friends affected them, especially coming from a smaller county or not coming into high school with familiar faces.” To amend this, Devesh Kumar said, “we ended up developing a concept for an app that would connect the student body with clubs and activities by using an interest survey.”

To develop this new solution, Kumar said “the developing process followed the engineering design process, where we brainstormed, researched, and planned out our solution.” The solution, which Bugauisan shared was titled “Club Connect,” involved a slight issue, as “most of us are unfamiliar with coding,” said Bugauisan. Luckily, Kumar shared that he was able to help in that aspect, due to his “many years of coding experience.” When writing the project proposal, Kumar said, “we split the club into multiple subgroups to focus on specific parts.” Kumar added that after this section was complete, they had to spend a large amount of time focusing on making edits, as they were provided with a narrow word count.

Bugauisan shared that working as a member in the Engineering club on this competition has “allowed [her] to better [her] skills of working with others,” adding that “all of the members have amazing ideas to add or improve some regions of the app [they] are working on.” Samuel Choi, another member of the Engineering club, said, “the experience was fun, and I believe that the group generally enjoyed the task!” The Engineering club learned of their status as state finalists at an impromptu lunch meeting put on by Ms. Kemmerly after she found out, and the Engineering club is now waiting to see if they will move forward in the competition.