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MATE
About MATE
About MATE
The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center was established in 1997 thanks to a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advance Technical Education (ATE) Program.
Please learn more about MATE on the official site.
NASA describes MATE as:
The MATE (Marine Advanced Technology Education) Center uses underwater robots – also known as remotely operated vehicles or ROVs – to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and prepare students for technical careers.
Working in partnership with the Marine Technology Society ROV Committee, MATE created the ROV competition as a way to:
Engage students in STEM and expose them to science & tech careers
Encourage students to develop and apply technical, teamwork, and problem solving skills
Provide funds, materials, and technical expertise to support student learning provide industry with skilled individuals who can fill workforce needs
The MATE competition challenges K-12, community college, and university students from all over the world to design and build ROVs to tackle missions modeled after scenarios from the ocean workplace.
Focus for 2025
Focus for 2025
From the official MATE website:
MATE Floats! 2025 is inspired by the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded GO-BGC Project. The goal of GO-BGC is to build a global network of profiling floats with chemical and biological sensors to monitor circulation, chemistry, biology, and overall ocean health. Scientists, engineers, and technicians are using NSF grant funds to build and deploy 500 robotic ocean-monitoring floats around the globe. As of August 2024, 217 out of the targeted 500 GO-BGC floats have been deployed or will be deployed shortly.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Events
Training
Training
Building
Building
Testing
Testing
Previous Events (2024)
Previous Events (2024)
Coaches attend the winter training with hands-on learning about the competition; including rules, tournament, and related equipment.
Practice & Design
Practice & Design
Despite bad weather, a student's family near campus let students get in a little last minute practice to become accustomed to the controls.
Unexpected bad weather resulted in all after school activities cancelled on the day we'd organized to test the finished ROVs.
A parent brought up a small inflatable pool to test them the next day. We were able to test all three ROVs, verifying all control boxes worked and all cabling was water-tight.
Planning and preparation for student presentation as well as ROV and Controller construction; including wiring, heat sealing
Learning to solder via instructional videos and teacher guidance.
When successful, the LED lights up red or green via a directional switch.
Competition Day
Competition Day
Three groups of WAIS students competing, a middle school team (Catfish 1), upper school team (Catfish 2), and a mixed team (Catfish 1.5).
Students reviewing their scheduled times and prepare for ROV inspection. All of our ROVs passed inspection, minor adjustments made as suggested.
Teams operate their ROVs in attempt to complete as many challenges as possible within a set time period.
There are several rounds and different challenges are worth different numbers of points. There are no practice rounds, but each team does have a few minutes to prep at the pool before the round begins.
* Not Pictured: The competition also included student presentations.
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