Starting during the 2019-2020 school year, Montevallo High School surveyed interest of several students to develop an elite team of individuals who could pool their varied talents to learn concepts such as electrical circuits, buoyancy, marketing, design, and even finance to create a vehicle that could be used to tackle 21st century issues related pollution, marine biology, and aquatic engineering. This ROV had to meet certain parameters but could overall be built as they choose. In the end, however, their ROV would compete against other teams from other schools in a timed contest to complete several rounds of tasks, as illustrated in the video here. To test their ROV, the team also had to create a series of props to help with research and development in order to practice and troubleshoot the device.

Finally, once the ROV was built and tested the team was supposed to travel to compete in the three day MATE Northern Gulf Coast regional contest hosted by Dauphin Island Sea Lab in April of 2020. Unfortunately, due to quarantines made necessary by the COVID-19 Pandemic, this competition was canceled BUT we are on track to compete during the 2020-2021 school year in the MATE Competition in the Spring of 2021 and possibly others, such as the SeaPerch ROV contest. For more information, contact Mr. Martin.