Immaculate's Engineering Team Moves On To National Championship

DANBURY, CT — Immaculate High School's engineering team has won the state level "Connecticut Governor’s Challenge" and will now compete in the national/international competition in April.

It's not The Brave Engineers' first rodeo: the Immaculate team has won first place five times on the state level and has been recognized as one of the top three teams nationally.

The Real World Design Challenge is an annual competition run by public and private partnerships with the goal of "setting a solid foundation for our future STEM workforce," according to the tournament's website. It gives high school students the chance to work on real-world engineering challenges, within the constraints of running a profitable business. It's not enough to just design a better mousetrap, teams must present a sustainable, detailed business plan for their enterprise.

This year’s assignment was to create an unmanned aircraft system that delivers LD3 cargo — a container about 150 cubic inches — from urban to rural areas. The Immaculate team designed a state-of-the-art drone – the 5N-22BE, which they nicknamed "Hummingbird" – for cargo delivery.

It's not just the business plan that needed to be sustainable. Rules for this year's competition also mandated that the technologies used drastically reduce environmental and ecological risks.

Senior Hayley Curry of Danbury was responsible for Hummingbird's "operations and safety." She described her work as "basically figuring out all the technology that would go into the plane — sensors and radar how it would integrate with other man's airplanes, and also just how it would fit into FAA regulations."

The future architecture major also had to craft contingency plans and protocols that would keep the aircraft, its cargo, and the people on the ground beneath it safe in the event of a catastrophe.

The rest of the Brave Engineers team includes:

Ava Viola ‘23 (Organizational Lead) - Sherman
Nicole Radliff ‘24 (Technical Lead) - New Fairfield
Yipeng (Simon) Zhao ‘24 (Design) - Sandy Hook
Junyi (Luka) Lu ‘24 (Design) - Danbury
Collin Lowthert ‘24 (Operations) - Wilton
Guanlin (Bruce) Lu ‘24 (Business) - New Milford

The team will compete in the national/international championship, held virtually on April 22.