How a Group of Teens Helped Us See the Ocean Like Never Before | XPRIZE Innovators

Earth's oceans have long been one of humanity's greatest unknowns. And in 2015, scientists projected it would take 600 years to map the seafloor. That is until one audacious competition revolutionized the way we survey the great abyss. The Shell Ocean Discovery X-P Prize was a competition to advance autonomous, fast, highresolution deep sea exploration. And for one unlikely team of underdogs, these unknowns weren't an impossibility. They were a welcome challenge. Team Ocean Quest, a driven group of junior high and high school students from San Jose's Valley Christian schools, took on teams with researchers, scientists, and innovators from some of the world's top institutions. Against tough competition, they set out to prove that innovation knows no age. And over the course of the prize, they would show the world that they had what it takes to compete at the highest level. My name is Danny Kim. I'm the VP of applied mass science and engineering here at Valley Christian Schools. Kim discovered the Shell Ocean Discovery X-P Prize while seeking opportunities for students to gain access to realworld STEM experiences and make meaningful scientific discoveries. Excited by its potential, Kim built a team of students to enter the competition. What X-P prize does is it gives them the hands-on learning opportunity where their motivation is to find the solution to an unsolvable problem. What what better uh challenge can you give to to high school kids? Though many were not yet old enough to drive, the team set out to explore the ocean depths. Lacking the major backing of institutions and investors, they had to get creative to source autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs to compete. We found out that to actually have a autonomous underwater vehicle that can go up to 5,000 m costs about a million dollars, half a million to a million dollars. Actually, I went to the students and said, I said, "You know what? We can't compete. We're going to have to give up." Uh, and that their response was, "Mr. Kib, let us try." And the what the kids did was they started emailing and calling everybody. The students tenacity impressed experts in the field and it paid off. Riptide that actually donated. This is a prototype of an underwater vehicle, one fifth the size of a typical one um that can go 5,000 m. We took an existing AEV system uh and adapted it to the problem. And that's something that I think X-ray has really pushed for us uh to do sort of by the constraints of the problem and the time frame that we have. The students took this hardware and began developing strategies and software for ocean floor mapping, testing their innovation in swimming pools. At times when I was discouraged, it was the kids who came to me and say, "Mr. Kim, we got to keep trying." Through their determination and resourcefulness, the team made it all the way to the competition semifinals. Among the larger and better funded teams, however, Ocean Quest found themselves outmaneuvered, but not discouraged. The team, the youngest ever to reach a semi-finals round in X-P prize history, refocused their efforts on the Noah bonus prize. This $1 million challenge required teams to identify and trace a biological or chemical signal in the ocean all the way to its original source. So what the kids were able to do is they were able to write an algorithms that actually would do kind of semi-AI based search and find uh algorithms. They adapted their small AUV with an off-the-shelf fllorometer, a device used to measure fluoresence intensity along with a satellite communication system. All the elements from hardware to software to the algorithms to track the actual die was everything that had to come together in perfect unison. On the day of the bonus competition finals, however, their challenges weren't over. On the last day of the competition, we lost our EV. It actually never came back up. So, all we had was our backup one that was broken. And the battery didn't have enough power to actually dive. But once again, the students of Ocean Quest refused to quit. The students that came back and said, "We need to try everything, Mr. Kim." While brainstorming a solution to their problem, Kim took inspiration from a psalm sent to him by the school's principal about the power of God's right hand. That gave me the idea, what if I held it in my hand by my right hand, turned it on remotely and threw it into the ocean while I'm on the boat. The X-P prize judges at the time, they're looking at me like, "You are a crazy man. This is our last run. This is our last try, so why not try it?" We threw it into the ocean and it had just enough thrust to actually dive and make one final run. Like the determined team behind it, the AUV overcame challenges and doubts to successfully complete its search for the chemical signal. That was the data from the final run that won us the bonus prize. The students won the bonus competition and $800,000 for their school. But this was not just a victory for the young team. It was fuel for scores of students to come. Now we're inspiring a new generation of students that believe nothing's impossible. Among that seemingly impossible work, the Shell Ocean Discovery XP prize shortened the time necessary to map the ocean floors from 600 years to just 10. And while it was Valley Christian School's first X-P prize, students are now competing in their sixth X-P prize competition, each new prize attracts hundreds of applications from young innovators hoping to join the next worldchanging competition. You're doing work that is, you know, far beyond the usual high school experience. It was unbelievable opportunity for me to be able to compete in the X-P prize at such a young age. Inspiring the kids is such a big part of true learning. When you are able to inspire kids through something like an X-P prize, you really change their whole trajectory of how learning happens. To learn more and join a team, head to xprise.org.