Engineering Design and Development (EDD), is a Career Technical Education (CTE) class where students are introduced to advanced topics in the engineering field and is the capstone course in the Engineering pathway. In order to take EDD you must first take either Introduction to Engineering Design or Principles of Engineering. The students in EDD work on big design projects in large teams; design, fabricate, assemble, program and test their designs; and participate and compete in local and regional competitions in the engineering and robotics fields, such as the JPL Invention Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), under the name of “Absolute Value.”

The JPL Invention Challenge presents a difficult task to teams, which must be completed by the use of a mechanized contraption. Usually, the team that completes the task the fastest wins the competition. This year, Absolute Value competed in JPL’s Upright Pipe Contest, where the challenge was to lift a pipe that was lying down on the ground to stand upright on a platform using a device with no human intervention.

The FRC presents a game challenge to teams. Teams must work in randomized alliances of three teams to score as many points as possible with their robots. This year’s challenge, Destination: Deep Space, required teams to place as many pieces of cargo (orange balls) and hatch panels (circular disks) onto a makeshift rocket and cargo ship, and then proceed to get onto a platform. There is an attack/defense component to this game as well.

Sophomore Michael Tin is proud of the team’s big improvements from its previous years. “We obtained our best performance in team history overall this year, so it was definitely a really good season for us. I think we could improve on team coordination and communication a bit, but other than that it was a really fun year!”

Despite how much he enjoys EDD today, he originally didn’t even plan on taking the class. “The elective I was supposed to take in freshman year filled up before I could join, so I ended up being placed in Principles of Engineering (POE) instead. I ended up really enjoying the class, especially the hands-on aspect of it, and decided to pursue further challenges in the EDD class this year. It has been a really unique experience and is definitely different from my other classes. Definitely the most entertaining and enjoyable class I’ve ever taken.”

The Los Angeles Regional is considered the gold ticket of all of the regionals around the world. The team that wins LA normally wins the Worlds competition in Houston. As such, it is the hardest to compete in since the LA regional has the best teams. In 13 years, Arcadia has only been in the finals twice. Once in 2010 and this year where Absolute Value was the Alliance Captain of three teams. The team’s final ranking was 11th of 56 teams. Congratulations, EDD!

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