On April 27th and 28th at Texas A&M University, hundreds of students from all over the globe gathered for the 12th US National STEM League Finals (NSL), one of the most esteemed high school competitions featuring engineering, coding, enterprise, graphic design, etc. NSL utilizes the interesting challenges of RC Racing, Rover and UAV challenges to test student’s abilities to apply theoretical knowledge in real applications. Shanghai High School International Division teams GT Racing and M-Dynamic attended the NSL, vying to be the best of the best. In the end, GT Racing won a total of 9 championship trophies, including the third place overall Grand Trophy amongst all US and international contestants.

Modelled on America’s most popular motorsport, NASCAR, the Racing challenge includes many sections, including 3 different races, pit stop, aerodynamics testing, Data-Driven Design, etc. Under the guidance of our coach Mr. Duncan Zhang and the inspiring leadership of team captain Gabriel Zhang, GT Racing members modified, tuned and improved their ride to increase its performance, while also writing long technical reports and logbooks months before the competition. They also designed in CAD and tested custom parts for their Data-Driven Design and Aerodynamics. On race day, everyone worked hard to fine-tune the car to the track. GT Racing was selected to race best of the best teams in the NSL. The races were long, tight and difficult as cars tailed each other tightly, waiting for an opportunity to pass. In the end, GT Racing won first place in the Pit Stop Challenge, Aerodynamics and Drag Racing, beating many established teams from the US. Finally, GT Racing acquired the third place overall grand trophy in race events after a long day.

In the Rover Challenge, GT Rover worked hard to design and build their rover and utilized complicated programming codes to achieve their goals in the competition, which included moving straight, navigating through a grid and avoiding obstacles. In addition to coming in second-place among all Rover teams, GT Rover was the first team to ever complete the parallel parking challenge. Their outstanding parallel parking performance was videotaped as the official instructing video for the NSL competition and uploaded to their official website for future teams to view as an example.

Lastly, as a new challenge this year, the UAV competition consisted of many different courses contestants had to fly their UAV through. The GT Racing Drone team greatly surpassed all other teams in flying their drone and won the UAV challenge.

In summary, GT Racing won 5 first place awards, 1 second place, 1 third place, 1 international award, and third overall among all teams competing in the NSL, which made them the most awarded team among all challenge participants and showed a gigantic improvement from last year’s results. By attending this competition, GT Racing students not only learned new knowledge in engineering and computer science, but also important lessons on teamwork and cooperation. Congratulations to GT Racing for their achievements!

Coach: Mr. Dongsheng Zhang

Group Leader: Mr. Hui Liao

Team Captain: Gabriel Zhang

GT Racing members: Justin Tong, Harry Zhang, Nathan Hung, Tim Kang

GT Rover members: Charlie Ji, Andy Gu, Tim Chen, Charlie Chen

GT Drone member: Kelvin Lai

Enterprise member: Maechen Wang

(Written by 10(9)Gabriel)