Woodstock Students Place in International Engineering Competition

A team of seniors from Woodstock High School recently earned third place in an international engineering competition, the Cherokee County School District announced.

For the Real World Design Challenge, Carson Bove, Camden Browning and Mary Hogrefe designed an award-winning Unmanned Aircraft System to help mitigate wildfire. They are fourth-year students in the Career Pathway: Engineering and Technology program led by teacher Melanie Salas.

The competition follows the engineering design cycle, with teams required to design and plan using a real-world approach, including analyzing costs and efficiency.

The team won the statewide competition in January and advanced this spring to the international competition, making their virtual presentation in April to a judging panel.

Their winning entry created CRISPI: the Compact Robotic Imagery System for Preventing Infernos, a backpack-sized drone that acts as fire lookout, environmental scientist and wildfire specialist.

Their 50-page entry demonstrated their design would be more than six times less costly than current systems in use, as well as far more portable and efficient.

The students all plan to pursue careers in engineering.

Hogrefe will attend Kennesaw State University to study biochemistry, Bove will study biomedical engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Browning will major in mechanical engineering with a specialty in robotics at the University of Florida.