The 70 or so kids who gave up their Saturday morning will soon be making one of these devices for themselves through the SeaPerch program.
The SeaPerch program gets grade-school students building the underwater remote operating vehicle. It’s part of a competition designed to be fun, while still giving students new ways to learn and apply science, technology, engineering and math to a particular challenge.
Kids build the $143 kits through the program, sponsored by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research. They document their experiences in a notebook and compete with other students in an annual championship. This year’s contest is April 26 and 27 at Drexel University in Philadelphia.