Congratulations to our MESA team, MESA coordinators and outstanding Parent Volunteers! 

St. Mary of The Mills school participates in the Maryland MESA program. Maryland MESA sponsors regional and statewide events to develop and highlight the abilities of students in STEM. Throughout the academic year, students conduct research and prepare to participate in competitions that demonstrate to educators and parents what they have learned through participation in the MESA program.

Maryland MESA Challenges are aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.

MESA Day, an annual STEM competition held in each MESA state, provides students the opportunity to design and build projects, win medals, learn by doing, visit a college campus, and interact with each other as well as STEM professionals.

MESA Day is also a qualifying competition for the MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition held in June.

The top middle and high school teams from each state’s MESA Day will continue competing against their fellow MESA students to obtain the coveted title of MESA USA Champion.

  • Building a Basal Wood Bridge (6th grade) The objective of this challenge is to engage students in the engineering and design process through the construction of a wood bridge, which will be assessed for its strength-to weight ratio (efficiency).

  • Interactive Game Design with Alice3x (7th grade) Teams will develop interactive games that are fun, educational, and creative using the Alice Version 3x ( 3.2.5 or Higher) programming software. The games must have multiple levels and focus on teaching principles related to safe and ethical cyber/computer use.

  • National Engineering Design Competition ( 7th grade) Arduino Based Solutions for Humans asks students to implement the Human-Centered Design approach to find a client in your community who has a need, engineer a solution for this need using Arduino as the key component, and present your solution and recommendation(s) for next steps at the MESA USA National Engineering Design Competition.

  • Wearable Technology (8th grade) The objective of this project is to engage students in the engineering design process through the design and construction of a wearable neonatal health monitoring system. Teams will design, build, and demonstrate a wearable device to monitor a specific indicator of potential neonatal illness (i.e., respiration rate).