By Florida Catholic staff - Florida Catholic
Photographer: COURTESY
From left to right, St. Anthony School's national TEAMS winners: Michael Fultz, Alexander Schmid, Andrew Rashtanov and Ava Leong. They achieved first place in the Presentation category in the national competition that occurred from June 28 to July 2, 2023.
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky | Out of thousands of national and international middle school students competing in the TEAMS engineering challenge, St. Anthony School came out on top.
Pitting their STEM skills and resourcefulness against other teams hailing from far and wide, rising seventh graders Michael Fultz, Ava Leong, Andrew Rashtanov, and Alexander Schmid achieved first place in the Presentation category in the national competition that occurred from June 28 to July 2, 2023.
TEAMS — Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science — is a competition with middle school and high school divisions. Students must overcome the state competition’s Essay, Multiple Choice, and Essay/Build tests, with over 10,000 students making up teams vying to place in the top 20%.
St. Anthony School’s four participating teams ranked in the top 20% of the state competition earlier this year, enabling them to proceed to nationals.
In the national competition, groups competed for Best-in-Nation in Presentation, Design/Build, and Multiple Choice Exam categories. This year’s theme was “Engineering and Everyday Devices.”
For the Presentation categories, groups crafted presentations arguing that a particular device of their choice — barring mobile phones — should be designated the Best Everyday Device. The teams were required to build a six-slide presentation about the device, its history, its relevance to engineering, and the team’s argument for the device. They also had to film a 30-second video.
St. Anthony School’s Team A presented on the metric measuring device, particularly rulers and meter sticks. The team, which won first place in the Presentation category, was the only team from Florida to win the middle school division, and won out against teams from Turkey, California, New Jersey, and Ohio.
