Panther’s Blast Into 1st Place
One of the five Peninsula teams won first place at the national round of StellarXplorers, a STEM program in which teams of students compete to design simulated satellites through formulating their orbits and launch locations. This competition prompts theoretical issues – such as how best to gather data from the South Pole – that the teams have to solve by creating original missions. These missions are then critiqued by judges to determine which team displayed the most thoughtful and effective strategy. The idea of participating in the StellarXplorers competition was brought up by AP Computer Science and Principles, Computer Science Advanced Projects, Introduction Engineering Design and Civil Engineering teacher Hassan Twiet in 2016. This year’s winning team is made up of juniors Karry Cui, Yifan Gu, Kylie Jiang, Dino Li, Bobby Yuan and Brian Zhang.
The national round took place from April 20 to 23 at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Johnson Space Center in Houston. Teams qualified for the national round by placing in the top 10 out of approximately 200 teams in four prior competitions, which began in October and were held virtually. Jiang, one of the members of the winning team, notes the importance teamwork had in helping their team achieve first place.
“The way everyone was very cooperative and focused on their work made the journey to first place [very smooth],” Jiang said. “It is very important in the competition to stay on task whilst [doing your] job correctly. I think everyone on our team worked well [with each other] so we were [never] working [under pressure].”
During each round of the competition, the team delegated a specific role to each member. Two members were in charge of the coding aspect of the mission and others were accountable for analyzing the prompt. Despite having separate tasks, they all had to communicate with one another in order to succeed. Due to this year being all of the members’ first year participating in the competition, they say they did not perform well in the first couple of rounds. The members believe that collectively overcoming their struggles in these beginning rounds helped them during the difficult semifinal and final rounds. Gu describes the emotions he felt after overcoming those obstacles.
“We had so many instructions to read when I joined,” Gu said. “It was [quite] overwhelming to comprehend most of what the mission was about, but later on, it became easier to adapt. It was such an amazing experience to win nationals, and I believe our hard work paid off.”
The StellarXplorers competition will be held again next year and the team hopes to improve by enhancing their strategy in distributing the workload. They also think that winning first place in the country has greatly boosted their confidence. Joining StellarXplorers has been beneficial to students such as Li, who is one of the team’s coding specialists, so he looks forward to competing again and continuing his passion for space engineering.
“I would watch and read about stars when I was young,” Li said. “Joining this organization meant a lot for me because I was allowed a gateway to help me explore more of what I am passionate about. It is important for this organization to continue and show more people about space.”
