Ark Valley News - Technology students have strong showing at national conference

Eighth-graders Asa Unruh and Chris Paul.

Technology students have strong showing at national conference
By Matt Heilman
Last Updated: August 22, 2013

A pair of Valley Center eighth-graders made a splash at a national competition.

Asa Unruh and Chris Paul made the most of their first national Technology Student Association Conference by holding their own against some of the brightest young minds in the nation in challenges that tested students' engineering, design, construction and problem-solving skills.

Unruh and Paul participated in the June 28 through July 2 National TSA Conference in Orlando, Fla., after qualifying for the event at the state TSA conference in late March.

Unruh and Paul combined to finish in the top 20 of a structural design challenge by building a small beam that held 44 pounds, constructed dragsters that each finished in the top 40 out of 137 racers and finished eighth out of about 100 participants in a teamwork exercise called Techno Talk.

In the Techno Talk challenge, Unruh and Paul worked with a pair of students from another school to complete a project with limited communication. To challenge the students, teammates were in separate rooms and could only offer instruction to one another through limited text messaging.

Unruh and Paul said they were able to succeed at the national conference with help from TSA sponsor and Valley Center Middle School technology teacher Mickey Harvey and other advisers from Kansas.

The national TSA conference featured between 4,000 and 5,000 technology students from across the United States, as well as a few international students. Paul and Unruh admitted they were nervous, surrounded by a large group of competitors.

Harvey, who brought VCMS representation to the national conference for the third year in a row, was named the National Advisor of the Year at the conference. He attributed students' success to the continued pursuit of improving their skill sets by learning from mistakes in class projects and problem-solving exercises.

"One thing I talk to them about is, every time you do something, you succeed and you fail," Harvey said. "It's to what degree are you going to succeed and to what degree are you going to fail? … You're never going to get something done 100 percent. I like to relate it to track or cross country simply because you're never going to get the perfect time. Even if you get the best time in the world, you're going to want to improve it."

As eighth-graders Paul and Unruh said they're looking forward to serving leadership roles in the middle school's TSA program this year and building off their recent experience to make another strong showing at the 2014 national TSA conference next summer.