Sea, Air, and Land Competition
THE INFORMATION BELOW IS FROM THE 2022-2023 SCHOOL YEAR FOR REFERENCE ONLY.
STAY TUNED FOR
2023-2024 UPDATES!
The Sea, Air and Land (or SeAL) Challenge objectives are three-fold:
The first objective of the program is to provide students with an opportunity to tackle a difficult engineering project while still in high school.
The second objective is to provide students with an awareness of the tremendous technical careers in the Department of Defense and armed forces.
The third objective of the program is to help educators and administrators implement a successful Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program into their schools given time, budget, and resource constraints.
The Pennsylvania State University Electro Optics Center, in collaboration with the Office of Naval Research Program, have developed the Sea, Air & Land Challenge, a unique and effective way to manage high school students in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. This competition brings together teams of 3-10 high school students to design and build robotic vehicles and payloads.
Teams work to complete a high-level engineering challenge, with assistance from engineering mentors with industry experience. The program culminates in a “Challenge Day” event where students showcase their accomplishments and is designed to provide an exciting window into careers in STEM while developing their skill sets beyond standard classroom activities
Students will have 12-16 weeks to design unmanned vehicles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) payloads to compete in predefined sets of challenges. Each team is responsible for securing funding for their team and is paired with an industry mentor to guide them through the design and building process. The systems are then used to compete in challenges that mimic missions encountered by the military, national security agencies and first responders.
The program, now in its eleventh year, is free to students, school districts and organizations. There is no fee for registration or the program material. However, each team is responsible for securing their own funding, a maximum of $600 per team, for their open-sourced robotic system as part of the challenge. Demonstrating effective budgeting and cost management for their project is considered in scoring each teams’ work.
Visit the Sea, Air, and Land homepage for more supporting documents including Student guidelines, information on the engineering process, survival guides, judging rubrics, and a sample curriculum and syllabus.
**Click on Support Docs on the top white menu bar and enter the password “challenge” (all lower case) when prompted (you may have to do this twice), then scroll through the embedded files. Note that the Challenge missions have been updated for 2022-2023.
Dr. Len Litowitz from Millersville University will host this year’s South Central Pennsylvania regional SeAL Challenge (https://seaairland.psu.edu/southcentral-pa/). Fall semester activities include registration, determining implementation method (i.e. in-class, after school, other), team formation, and fundraising as needed. The SeAL Challenge itself, beginning with choosing a sea, air or land Challenge and conducting background research, ordering supplies and building, is conducted over the second semester during the school year. A Challenge Day date in April 2023 has not yet been confirmed.
SeAL Short.mp4