Venice’s Math, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) Club competed at the Pre-MESA Day competition at USC on March 4. Venice was one of 16 different high schools that competed. Venice’s team did very well in the competition, placing first, second and third in different categories.

The competition consisted of three portions: math, projects and the building of a prosthetic arm.

Tenth grader Elvin Canseco won first place in the math portion. Second place were Lucy Pan, Brenda Felipe and Kriseira Llames, a group of seniors who worked as a team. Johnny Pan, a freshman, scored third place.

For the projects segment of the competition, the contestants had to perform an egg drop and build gliders out of balsawood.

The egg drop was only for 9th and 10th graders. Makena Cioni won second place.

The winner for the glider competition was chosen based on which team’s glider stayed in the air for the longest amount of time. Johnny Pan and Thomas Koon won at first place for the 9th/10th grade glider competition; also at first place were Lucy Pan and Felipe for the 11th/12th grade glider competition.

For the final part of the competition, students had to build a prosthetic arm powered by Arduino Programming. The Venice team consisted of Pedro Celis, Aaron Cruz, Ray Garcia and Kevin Figueroa. The team earned first place for object relocation where the prosthetic arm they built picked up an object and moved it somewhere else, third place for a technical paper where they explained the process of building the prosthetic arm, qualifying them for second place overall.