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Compton ’s Roosevelt Middle School made history as the first California school to score two first place wins at the National MESA Engineering Design Competition held last June in Baltimore, Maryland. California MESA’s high school team from Costa Mesa High School also emerged triumphant, with a third place win in the high school category. Roosevelt Middle School teammates Erie French, Alexis Padilla, Raymundo Villasenor and Jeffrey Washington bested top middle school teams from MESA programs in seven other states to emerge as the national champions. The Costa Mesa High School team of Juan Dominguez, Dorian Flores, Richard Kyo and Ted Lee won third place in the rigorous academic contest. The competition called for the students to research, design and build a trebuchet, an ancient weapon similar to a catapult. Each team’s trebuchet had to be built according to strict guidelines and was evaluated on distance, accuracy and design efficiency; high school projects also were evaluated on strength. Student wrote technical papers explaining the math and science principles behind the project, prepared academic displays, and delivered oral presentations. Competition sponsors included DaimlerChrysler, Northrop Grumman, the University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins University. The Roosevelt team was led by MESA advisors Oscar Espinoza and Philip Gerlach. Roosevelt is part of the UC Irvine MESA Center, which directs MESA activities in Compton schools. The Costa Mesa team was guided by MESA Advisor Steve Nelson. Costa Mesa is one of the schools directed by the MESA Center at CSU Fullerton. To qualify for the national competition, the Roosevelt and Costa Mesa student teams had to emerge as the top winners in preliminary contests held across California. Then students had to best the top regional winners at the state trebuchet competition, held last May at CSU Fresno. The winning middle and senior high school teams from the state competition earned the honor of representing California at the national competition in Maryland. “Going to the nationals is an incredible experience for our students,” said Juanita Muñiz-Torres, director of Program Operations for California MESA. “They compete with the best teams from other states who are just as driven as they are,
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