Students from the Bayfield and Durango school districts came together this week to debate – productively and academically.
The high school mock trial event was held Tuesday at the Impact Career Innovation Center and allowed about 40 high school students from the two districts to practice pitching products and projects to industry leaders in preparation for the Technology Student Association state competition.
The Technology Student Association is “a national non-profit career and technical student organization of middle and high school students engaged in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” the nonprofit’s website says.
Bayfield High School has a long history with TSA – but Durango High School has only supported a TSA program for three years.
DHS won fourth place at state last year – the first year it competed – and just barely missed qualifying for nationals, said Durango High School CTE Instructor and Lead TSA Advisor Morgan Kraska.
The TSA competition categories include animatronics; audio podcasting; and board game, video game and biotechnology design, among others.
The regional mock trial was set up to mirror the state TSA conference, Kraska said.
“This is a day to try to give (students) a chance to connect with industry professionals, pitch their work, get some feedback, refine it, get used to talking about it,” she said. “(They’re) kind of put in the hot seat a little bit to help them prepare for (state in) the next couple of weeks. As always, in anything CTE, we try to make it real, try to connect it right to a career, try to just kind of throw them into that mix.”
Bayfield and Durango High School students competed in a practice pitching session similar to the Shark Tank process to help them prepare for state. The two teams, each made up of a handful of students, were given five minutes to dream up a faux product for construction workers and pitch it to a team of “judges” played by other students and TSA Co-Advisor Darrien Clitso.
Bayfield High School senior and TSA Secretary Reese Appenzeller led his team in a pitch for a specialized $350 hand drill.
The opposing team, led by Durango High School freshman Miles Tullos, pitched a $9,000 portable electronic sign for use on construction sites.
Reese’s team ended up winning the exercise.
“It really just gave me the opportunity to go out there and display my thinking (and show) what we’ve been working on,” he said.
Reese, along with a team, crafted a robotics build that won in the regionals robotics category. He hopes to be able to bring it to state.
“Me and my partner have been working really hard on making this robot from scratch,” he said.
Other students at the mock trial worked on presenting projects from a range of different categories – such as the board game created by Durango High School freshmen Abbey Reeder, Fianna Jordan and Karleigh Kinn, who were competing for the first time at the regionals event.
“I think (TSA) is a really interesting, intricate experience that you can’t really get anywhere else,” Fianna said. “It’s so homey, and it’s just like I have all my friends and we’re in the same class and we went a whole semester together and we made this really awesome board game together.”
The group’s game, called Plush Pets Adventure, ended up winning the board game design category at regionals.
Local industry professionals conducted interviews with students at the mock trial, guiding them in their pitches and simulating what they might experience with judges at state.
Industry experts who offered their expertise included Sarah Douglas with Gaia Creative; Maisy Harlan, a design and communications student at Fort Lewis College and a DHS alumna; Harmon Pollock, a senior software engineer with Markforged; Roger Dodd, who formerly worked as the director of technology for the Bayfield School District; William Nollet, chair and associate professor of physics and engineering at Fort Lewis College; and Miles De Feyter, senior director of creative services at Brightspot and founder and CEO of Full Send SEO.
“This is an opportunity for (students) to go to interviews and collaborate and see if they can show their work and make sure that it's good enough to take it to state,” Clitso said. “We're using this as a safety blanket to have them test the waters.”
Durango High School teacher Peter Fogg and Brian McDonagh from the Bayfield School District supplied their mentorship at the mock trial alongside Kraska and Clitso, guiding students in the computer science and engineering and robotics categories, respectively.
Kraska underscored the value of the Bayfield and Durango collaboration.
“Last year we were at state and it was like Bayfield was a ship in the night, you know?” she said. “We didn't officially connect. We live right next to each other, and they do really well (in TSA) and it's been going on longer there and they're really established. I thought, ‘Why are we not collaborating more?’”
If any of the projects from Bayfield or Durango are chosen to move forward, they will be presented in Denver at the TSA state competition Feb. 19 through 21.
If any of the teams win at state, they will go on to nationals in Washington, D.C. June 22 through 26.
epond@durangoherald.com
