As submarines go, the USS Macaroni doesn’t look like much: a series of plastic pipes and rubbery mesh, propelled by two small thrusters and a hand-held circuit board.
But the underwater robot represents months of work by three tech-minded middle-schoolers from Milwaukee Montessori School.
The trio bested more than 50 middle-school teams in the U.S. Navy’s SeaPerch Robotic Submarine regional competition. Now, theirs is the youngest of four Wisconsin teams headed to the national competition Friday in Baton Rouge, La.
“This was the first time our school’s ever done it,” said 12-year-old Owen Ledger of Germantown, the team’s go-to-guy for the mathematical equations needed to calculate such things as buoyancy and water density.
“We were just trying it out,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this.”
Ledger and teammates Xander Salick and Samantha Stahl put their ROV — for Remotely Operated Vehicle — through its paces recently at their top-secret training center. (A friend of a friend’s apartment complex swimming pool.)