INDIAN HEAD, Md. — Sixteen high school students with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division’s (NSWC IHD) Naval Energetics Technology Apprenticeship Program (NETAP) braved the summer heat during the program’s underwater robotics competition at the Naval Support Facility Indian Head Aquatics Center, July 18. The competition was the culmination of the high school students’ three-week summer NSWC IHD internship.
NETAP provides students an opportunity to engage in a hands-on internship to develop their engineering skills. Over the course of the multi-week program, the students bolstered their tooling, soldering and programming skills by building miniature unmanned underwater vehicles. NETAP participants also received a stipend to compensate for their time spent on the program.
“NETAP gives area high school students an opportunity to learn what we do at NSWC IHD and communicate with mentors here,” said NSWC IHD STEM Coordinator Amanda Wilmot, who oversees the program.
The students divided into four teams and spent three weeks designing, programming and building an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that could maneuver under its own power. During the competition, each team raced their ROV between four challenges in the pool that tested control, speed, delivery, containment and recovery. Each of the challenges were designed to mirror actual U.S. Navy systems at NSWC IHD.
In addition to the competition, students submitted an engineering notebook to track their data and lessons learned then presented a final engineering report to summarize their accomplishments over the three-week internship. Notebooks and reports were scored along with each challenge of the competition to demonstrate their engineering processes.
Although the goal of the program is to challenge the young engineers with real-world naval scenarios, Wilmot explained it is also critical to introduce students to a potential career in supporting NSWC IHD and the Department of Defense.
“Through programs like NETAP, we can give students a variety of tasks and learning experiences to show them different paths that they can take at NSWC IHD,” Wilmot said. “We hope we have some of the future of our workforce here at today’s competition.”
NSWC IHD — a field activity of the Naval Sea Systems Command and part of the Navy’s Science and Engineering Establishment — is the leader in ordnance, energetics, and EOD solutions. The Division focuses on energetics research, development, testing, evaluation, in-service support, manufacturing and disposal; and provides warfighters solutions to detect, locate, access, identify, render safe, recover, exploit and dispose of explosive ordnance threats.
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