Championing Santa Cruz’s Young Engineers: Join Us on the Road to the World Championships!

Send Santa Cruz County 11th and 12th grade robotics engineers to the ROV world championship

The Santa Cruz County Office of Education X Academy ROV team is going to the world championship—and you can help them get there. 

X Academy’s Hephaestus Robotics has worked hard to get where it is. Team members designed and built an ROV capable of complex underwater tasks—including creating 3D models of underwater objects. They built a vertical profiling float, which autonomously sinks and rises through the water column and wirelessly sends water pressure and temperature data to the control station.

At the May regional competition, they earned an invitation to the MATE Underwater Robotics World Championship, where they will compete with 41 teams from across the U.S. and as far away as China and Saudi Arabia. 

So the team has to up its game. They are practicing performing  underwater tasks with their ROV and creating marketing materials and documentation of their engineering work. The Watsonville-based students who built the vertical profiling float are testing improvements to the buoyancy engine that enables the float to rise and sink.

X Academy is part of a strong Monterey Bay Area history in the MATE ROV competition. In previous years, high school teams from Salinas and Aptos have earned multiple invitations to the world championship. These youths are advancing technology to explore and steward the oceans—especially important next to one of the most diverse ocean ecosystems on the planet, the Monterey Bay. 

X Academy is a nonprofit formed to provide STEAM enrichment for Santa Cruz County students. It has sponsored ROV teams for the past four years. Support this year from the Santa Cruz County Office of Education enabled X Academy to expand the ROV program to more than 50 students from 17 schools

We hope you will contribute to make sure the entire team can participate in the world championship, June 18-22 in Kingsport TN. Travel to the competition will cost $40,000, so your gift helps ensure a student who has worked hard for months can see their ROV and float compete. To become a business sponsor of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education X Academy robotics team please contact coach Tim Sylvester (tim@xacademy.org).