Less than 24 hours after returning to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, from Okinawa and the Far East robotics challenge, Matthew C. Perry senior Maddie Medina was back on the softball field, playing first base for the Samurai. (Dave Ornauer/Stars and Stripes)
KADENA AIR BASE, Okinawa — Maddie Medina rarely experiences a week as hectic and exhausting as she experienced during the first week of this month.
Starting March 2, the Matthew C. Perry High School senior endured 14-hour bus rides from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni to Yokosuka Naval Base and back for the Red Devil Classic softball tournament sponsored on March 3 and 4 in Japan by the Department of Defense Education Activity Pacific.
Returning to MCAS Iwakuni early Sunday, she and a classmate power-studied for 2½-hours to catch up on schoolwork.
On Monday, they attended two classes before flying 1½ hours to Okinawa for a new DODEA-Pacific robotics competition.
“It’s actually pretty hard. I missed almost a week of school,” said Medina, who also played volleyball in the fall and attended the Far East Creative Expressions festival in December in Tokyo. “But I’m good at time management and I’m good at schoolwork, because if I’m not, I won’t be able to do these activities and I don’t want that.”
Medina’s experience is typical of DODEA students in the Pacific region who juggle their studies with athletics and extracurriculars that sometimes call for wide-ranging travel. After a three-year respite imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, these students are busy again, keeping bodies active and minds sharp.
Matthew C. Perry seniors Maddie Medina and Emanuel Paalam, freshman Jordin Knight and junior Sa'nia Moore attempt to get their robot to put a cone through a pole. (Dave Ornauer/Stars and Stripes)
The robotics festival — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST — was held March 7 and 8, concurrently with DODEA-Pacific’s three-day Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, at Kadena’s Rocker Enlisted Club.
All told, 25 students from six DODEA-Pacific high schools attended the symposium and 45 from eight schools took part in the FIRST tech challenge. While FIRST is in its first year, the symposium was revived after four years on the sideline due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s about time,” said event director Miki Stevens, a Kadena High School instructor.
Wave of the future
Medina, her five Perry teammates and the other teams spent the first day designing, building and coding robots.
On the second day, the robotics teams competed against one another, with referees and judges as observers.
Robotics is the wave of the future, said DODEA-Pacific activities coordinator DeAngelo Galang.
“It’s something we want to continue,” he said. “It’s vital to our nation’s future to ensure we have students able to be competitive in a global market.”
Next door from the robotics, at the science and humanities symposium, groups of three students each assembled projects based on their original research in the STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and math.
They presented research papers on the first day to a panel of judges, some from the United States, others from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, near Camp Schwab.
Mascot study
Soccer players Anna and Emily Hager and Leah Williamson, student-athletes from Daegu Middle-High School in South Korea, brought a real-life issue to the symposium for their project.
“We decided to research the process of how to arrive at deciding on a school mascot and what that mascot should be,” said Anna Hager, a sophomore who also plays golf for Daegu.
The school’s mascot for decades has been Warrior, a student in a Native American costume, which over the years has caused hard feelings and controversy within the school, Anna Hager said.
“A new mascot has been discussed since the start of the school year,” she said. “It gained traction starting in December and in January, we decided to make this our JSHS project.”
Ideas ranged from retaining the Native American mascot to replacing it with a magpie or the seventh-century Korean soldier-leader General Ulchi Mundeok, for whom the annual U.S. Forces Korea command-post exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield is named.
The Hagers and Williamson interviewed school principal Willard Clites, two Daegu seniors, two juniors and two middle schoolers. Once the symposium concludes, the three plan to take the project back to school and conduct a vote among students and teachers.
“But [the school mascot] will always be Warriors,” Anna Hager said. “We want to find something that will make the school more prideful.”
Daegu Middle-High School senior Leah Williamson, sophomore Anna Hager and junior Emily Hager work on their science and humanities project, the process of deciding a school mascot and what that mascot should be. (Dave Ornauer/Stars and Stripes)
Five hours
The top-five student projects at the symposium received monetary awards and berths at the national JSHS competition later this year in Virginia Beach, Va.
The top-four robotic projects in the FIRST challenge received banners.
Nile C. Kinnick senior Claire Bogen attended last year’s national JSHS in Albuquerque, N.M., and said it was a one-of-a-kind experience.
“A lot of super-smart kids, a lot of super-interesting projects and just a really inspiring experience,” she said. “It made me lot more passionate in seeing what kids are capable of doing in research.”
The three Daegu soccer players at the symposium hustled from the pitch to the plane. They beat Cheongna Dalton in a Saturday match at Camp Walker, then flew to Okinawa on Monday and will likely miss Friday’s home match against Seoul International.
Medina, meanwhile, boarded yet another flight on Thursday afternoon, headed back to Iwakuni for a weekend softball series against Canadian Academy and E.J. King at Iwakuni’s Atago Complex.
“And I’m also doing a bunch of layouts to get the February newspaper done,” said Medina, who’s also an editor for the school newspaper, Samur-Eye.
She managed five hours of sleep each night.
“And it wasn’t necessarily five good hours either,” she said. “Fast food, rice and powdered coffee. But I’m glad to have had the chance to do all that.”
