Despite not qualifying for nationals on April 17 at Great Meadows park, the RCMS TARC team is preparing for next year with a plan in mind.
“TARC is a competition where students apply their knowledge of engineering and science to create a rocket which will be launched at Great Meadows park in Fauquier County, Virginia, “ says Arnav Nair, eight-grader, Wolves team.
The TARC team builds large rockets around 3 to 4 feet, and launches them with an average altitude of 1,000 feet. They started off with making a rocket model in the application RockSim. This allowed them to test if their rocket model would fly as expected. Using the model built on RockSim, the team turns the idea into a full sized model rocket which gets launched at Great Meadows park for qualifications.
The team must do two rocket launches to see if they are eligible to proceed to the national level competition. There are around 1,000 teams. Fifty of the competing teams proceed to the national level tournament.
“I think we did pretty good in the qualifications. We have greatly improved over the years and were hoping for optimal results. We got 13 and 108 with a max score of 800, the lower the numbers the better,” said Arnav.
Tate Sheehan, seventh-grader on the Dream team, is a member of the TARC team. Tate was in charge of the marketing section of the team. He created a presentation, describing the rockets and how the team built them.
“I would definitely recommend TARC to future students as it is a really fun way to have a hands-on experience with STEM, building rockets that explode and having a small group to have close friends,” he said. “To all my seventh-graders, try out for TARC next year.“
Kedar Kalluri has been a TARC team member for two years.
“TARC was a really fun and an exciting opportunity to meet new people,” he said. “I got to collaborate on engineering projects with other persons, while launching rockets. It was very fun to watch because when we have good results, it’s very nice to see our hard work paying off.”
The TARC team members are Arnav Nair, Kedar Kalluri, Anjay Kannan, Abhinav Palaniappan, Tate Sheehan, and Charles Lis.
Next year, the team will be led by Abhinav Palaniappan and Tate Sheehan. They have an action plan which they are hoping to implement in the 2024-24 school year.
“We have an idea for next year which I am very confident will get us a spot at nationals next year,” said Abhinav.
