Val Tech students compete in Raytheon Engineering Games

On Wednesday, February 21, 2018, Valencia High School (VHS) Val Tech students Christopher Leung, Kellen Rivest, and Audrey Lin attended the Raytheon Engineering Games at the company’s El Segundo facility.

First on the agenda was a luncheon and introductions to the event hosts. The Valencia students had the opportunity to meet several Raytheon employees, including CalTech and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduates, and learn how these engineers in various fields decided on their career and pursued their goals in higher education. Students also learned more about Raytheon as a company and how many different departments within the discipline of engineering collaborate on complex projects.

After lunch, the students were presented the Engineering Games challenge: construct a heat bridge that remained in a certain temperature range. Students needed to apply their knowledge of thermodynamics to meet their goal of building a bridge that held its heat for the longest period of time. Every high school team was provided with a kit of multiple brackets, nuts, bolts, and heat bridge materials as well as a laptop with a software program that facilitated the estimation of resistance and expected temperature for different combinations of materials. Relying on knowledge acquired from the Raytheon engineers as well as their high school courses, the students also answered questions about the theory and the thermodynamic concepts that guided their design.

Val Tech was proud to send three engineering students to participate in Raytheon’s Engineering Games.