A Centaurus High School student team proved simple is best in a recent engineering challenge hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

As an out-of-state team, the eight Centaurus students were required to enter their project in the contest’s professional division. The “sticky wicket” challenge required building a device to launch rubber balls at five croquet-inspired targets set in an arc. Teams had 60 seconds to pass the balls through the targets in a specific order and could propel the balls only with a single, brief action.

Competing against professionals with access to fancy equipment, the students said, was a little intimidating.

But their simple design ultimately earned the most points in the division, giving them a victory.

“We went in with the assumption that we would be destroyed by the professional engineers,” said junior Adam Medeiros. “But simplicity wasn’t the worst idea. Simplicity can be a real strong suit. I was really proud of our work.”

He added the competition was an opportunity to see the ideas of those who work at NASA, as well as other high school students teams from California.

“I was very interested to see the other designs,” he said.

The Centaurus students built their device in just a few weeks using wood, a dowel, PVC pipe, canvas, rubber bands, washers, nuts, screws, eye hooks and paper. Not expecting to win, they also gave the device an artistic flair, including adding a tongue and gold tooth — and won an extra award for most artistic.

The team started by building a pendulum, but it didn’t strike the ball hard enough. So they added elastics. Other teams used air compressors or ramps to get more speed.

Senior Annabella DaGiau, the physics club’s co-president, joined the contest team because “it was a super cool opportunity to do something outside the project we were stuck on.”

“It was an awesome learning experience,” she said.

The project she and the club were stuck on last semester is designing a space plane payload with a goal of contributing to climate change research.

Students submitted a proposal for Dawn Aerospace’s “Paint Your Plane” competition in 2020, winning the opportunity to build a payload for the New Zealand company’s space plane. Their research is focused on direct sampling and analyzing the mesosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere, where there have been few observations because of the specialized aircraft and instrumentation needed to sample air at that altitude.

The 30 or so students in the club are working to design a measurement system, then they will analyze and interpret the collected air samples with help from area scientists.

The project, now in its third year, is expected to take multiple school years to complete.

And as the company makes changes to the design of the space plane, the parameters the students must meet also are changing. The amount of power they can use to collect the data was lowered, as was the amount of time they have to collect it.

“It’s been on pause,” DaGiau said. “The parameters are too tight for what we want to do. We have to do some redesigning.”

Although the project is proving difficult, she added, she’s glad the club took it on.

“It’s important data we want to collect,” she said. “It’s super meaningful work. It’s a little bit frustrating, but we’re all in it together.”

Senior and co-president Hannah Floyd added the club is developing a work plan for this semester with help from teacher sponsors Kimberly Becker and Maren Scarborough that includes reaching out to a local company about a custom design for one tricky component.

“It’s a puzzle, trying to figure everything out,” she said.

Along with the ongoing space plane payload project, the club plans to enter an international particle physics competition organized by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

A Centaurus team was “shortlisted” as a semifinalist in a previous year’s competition. The prize is a trip to Europe to carry out the team’s proposed experiment.

Sophomore Sloane Weiss said she joined the club for those kinds of real-world projects, allowing her to extend her learning beyond what she can do in class.

“You are working with people who are really smart,” she said.

“Here, I do physics for fun, not for a grade. You can explore.”