A team of five Altona Middle School seventh graders was one of 60 teams chosen to build a space exploration experiment they designed for a NASA STEM competition.

The students, who were part of a design elective class last semester, are spending this semester working with a mentor and teacher Stephanie Basile to learn skills and build the project. Once complete, their experiment will be launched in the summer by NASA.

“The whole point of it is it gives students a chance to learn what it is like to be an engineer,” student Dresdyn Fetter said.

The TechRise Student Challenge is designed to give middle and high school students an opportunity to design and test solutions for space exploration and the study of Earth while getting hands-on insight into the payload design and flight test process. The challenge is managed by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.