By Peter Elacqua
Staff Writer
MARLBORO – Students from the Marlboro Middle School excelled at the annual New Jersey Technology Student Association (TSA) Middle School State Conference at The College of New Jersey, Ewing.
Seventh- and eighth-graders who are members of the Marlboro Middle School TSA competed in the event. This year, approximately 800 students from more than 20 middle schools were in attendance at the conference.
Seventeen students coached by technology teacher Jamie Marrella placed first, second or third in eight different events, as follows:
• Shadmehr Khan placed third in the Computer-Aided Design Foundations competition for her 3D model design of a treehouse.
• Sagnik Chakraborty placed third in the Flight competition by designing and constructing a rubber-band powered balsa wood glider which was tested at the competition.
• The team of Christopher Cheung, Srinath Dantu, Joe Lombardi and Michael Papalcure placed third in the Website Design competition by creating their own website using Google Sites and focusing on the topic “Mission to Mars.”
• The team of Robert Kang, James Lavery, Rohan Sharma, Andrew Su, Ryan Sukhai and Amrith Yedlarajaiah placed third for the Inventions and Innovations competition for their blood pressure regulator design and placed second in Video Game Design for their “Working Life” game.
• Amoli Kapadia and Deeksha Patel earned second place in the Biotechnology Issues competition for their research paper and display on the topic of Hydrothermal Liquefaction.
• Matthew Ritsan earned first place in the Promotional Design competition by designing promotional materials for TSA, including a T-shirt, a fact sheet and a poster. Matthew’s winning poster design will be used as the cover of the 2018 NJ-TSA Middle School Conference program.
• Owen Legrand and Zachary Schneider earned first place in the Problem Solving competition by designing, planning, constructing and testing their own solution to a design challenge given to them at the conference.
“I am so proud of all of the participants at the NJ-TSA Middle School Conference this year,” Marrella said. “It is amazing to see students develop their own unique solutions to the different TSA challenges. I am always impressed to see how students can make an idea become a reality through hard work, dedication and continual redesign and refinement.”
