DB-TC is a proud recipient of the George and Helen Hartzog Award.  Awarded by the National Park Service, the Hartzog Award recognizes volunteers for the hard work, vast skills, and contributions that lead to the development of individual projects.  Our SOAR organization is a 2012 award winner.

Youth Volunteer Group Award

SOAR-Student Organization for Aquatic Robotics

Isle Royale National Park, Michigan

Designing and building submersible remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) for combating invasive species at Isle Royale National Park might appear to be an impossible challenge to most high school students. But the Dollar Bay High School's Student Organization of Aquatic Robotics (SOAR) took on this challenge.

In the course of a year and a half, 25 students, in grades 9-12, participated directly in the project. This represents approximately one third of the high school's student body at this rural K-12 school. Marine Robotics is a science elective course led by Dollar Bay High School teacher Matt Zimmer. Students in the course become members of the school's High School Enterprise Team, SOAR. In addition to in-class project work, the students and teacher spent and continue to spend many evenings and weekends working on the Isle Royale project.

The SOAR team was requested to engineer an ROV which could be used to monitor docks and inspect boat hulls for invasive mussels. This entailed engineering a design that:

• provided sufficient image quality to discriminate between invasive mussels and other organisms and to assure enough contrast to pick out mussels against the substrate in low light conditions;
• could record images for future reference and for baseline and mitigation;
• and was portable, durable, and low maintenance.

The complexity of the project has increased as SOAR team members build their knowledge base and become increasingly more sophisticated in their work.