Engineering club turns to crowdfunding for trip to nationals

Gavin Weaver didn’t prepare for this. A few hours before drones were to take flight at the Iowa Technology Student Association competition in Urbandale, he learned the news.

Despite no prep or experience at the controls, freshman Weaver would have to be the one to pilot his group’s designed drone through the complex flight path due to the competition schedule taking the assigned pilot away.

Over the next few hours, Weaver practiced piloting. He crashed a lot but slowly got better. When it was game time, Weaver said the flight was nerve-wracking.

The drone piloting team would win the whole thing, placing first in the state. Now, as Creston’s drone piloting team prepares for the 2026 National TSA Conference in Washington D.C., alongside the digital video production team, only one challenge remains. How do they get there?

Due to the extracurricular nature of TSA, and how it isn’t a school-sanctioned competitive event, the school district has its hands tied and is unable to fund travel for the team. Due to the success of the team, preparing for travel has been on short notice, and the students aren’t able to cover the full expense themselves.

There’s still some hope. The team, forming the Engineering and Innovation Club, created a GoFundMe to help the team get to nationals. The conference will take place June 22-26.

They’re raising funds to cover the cost of travel, four nights at the mandated conference hotel, equipment transportation and any additional travel costs for chaperones.

The club, school and coach Heidi Lumbard have found other ways to raise funds, from volunteering at concessions to a social media campaign. Out of a $12,000 goal, $7,645 has been raised as of April 30. Still a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Donations can be made to the club’s GoFund Me at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-creston-robotics-get-to-nationals.

The Engineering and Innovation Club consists of Weaver, senior Ben Rushing, sophomore Ayden Tindle and freshmen Fletcher Brown and Maddox Hansen. It’s easy to spot this is a younger crowd, something Lumbard has been preparing ever since expanding the scope of robotics and TSA to the middle school.

Tindle, Hansen and Brown worked together for robotics last year when the majority of them were eighth graders, making the walk from the middle school to the high school. While Rushing will be graduating this year, many years await Weaver, Tindle, Brown and Hansen.

With TSA giving students the tools to find their own success in engineering, Lumbard leaves it to the students to struggle or succeed. At the high school level, the experience is invaluable.

“It’s a foot into the world of robotics,” Rushing said. “It’s a foot into the world of engineering and the creative process that goes behind all of the technology that’s evolving in our world.”

“I do like being able to provide opportunities I didn’t have before,” Lumbard said. “That’s the point of the engineering classes that I teach is to give them something they’ve never done before. They don’t have to like it. That’s fine. But maybe, maybe there’ll be a career in there that [I can ask,] ‘did you know you could do this for a job?’”

Drone piloting

Lumbard’s love of robotics has electrified Creston’s robotics and engineering programs, from 4-H to Vex Robotics to TSA. One look at the classroom is all the proof one would need. Lined with cabinets containing parts for robotics (to the point where Lumbard has to organize which parts go to which class and project), the classroom is a young engineer’s gold mine.

In the back of the room, a wind tunnel, 10-feet long, sits on a table. That, alongside several other aerodynamic equipment, were smart purchases made by Lumbard when Southwest Valley held a sale of extra equipment. After all, Lumbard was the one who purchased the equipment for SWV originally.

“It became a whole bunch of electronics and robots and lots of things from my many years of teaching over there because I taught there for 12 years,” Lumbard said. “So anything that didn’t get sold at their [sale] that they had, I was able to buy it back, so to speak, but for this district.”

New classes have introduced students to concepts, including this year with a new aerospace engineering class. Weaver and Rushing took this class, where they worked together on aviation projects including drones.

When Weaver and Rushing formed a team to compete at TSA in drone piloting, with help from Tindle as the early pilot, they had to design their own drone. Those drones, outdated to the point where the controls can’t be run on newer phones (Lumbard supplied the team with what she called “really old” phones), were not the best at the competition.

Plus, Creston is competing against the entire state of Iowa schools. There’s no differing classes. Creston was up against metro schools like Johnston, Waukee and Iowa City.

Given a fighting chance through a donation of STEM kits from Gibson Memorial Library, the students got to work on their drones, even through the difficulties.

“They are a little janky,” Lumbard said. “It’s a little touchy. Sometimes they don’t connect like they’re supposed to because it’s 10-year-old software.”

“It doesn’t always like to do what it’s told,” Rushing added.

Creating a hook out of pipe cleaners which would be used to transport the items in the competition flight, the design was enough to give the team a first-place finish for the state. Still, there’s no guarantee in competition.

“You feel more pressure than you think you would normally,” Rushing said. “It’s not as calm as one would think.”

Digital video production

Tasked with creating a cohesive short film with a strict runtime of less than three minutes, the team of Brown, Weaver, Tindle and Hansen have been hard at work creating a competition-ready short.

Differing from the large group speech competition of short film, digital video production gains a major difference in documentation. Throughout each step of the process, the team has to document what they did. Similar to production notes, this documentation process helps show judges how a team used software and other technology to construct their short.

But, creativity still plays a large part in the competition. For Creston’s short, Brown took the helm as the main creative force of the project. Brown, adhering to the competition theme of “a twist in time,” chose an adventurous subject.

“What if the Nazis won World War II?” Brown described.

The team described the short as grim with a deep mood of despair. Laura Granger, Creston’s speech and drama educator, was consulted during the later stages of production and encouraged the students to analyze their subject from a historical perspective.

“I encouraged the group to focus on the message and what they want their audience to learn from the video, rather than glorifying violence,” Granger said. “With the tough topic, they need to handle it very sensitively.”

Granger said she wasn’t surprised by the choice of topic for these students. The team is passionate about history and chose the topic knowing they would give the subject the respect it deserves.

The team decided to analyze what would be lost in a new world, with a polio epidemic raging through the alternate history. The earliest polio vaccine was developed by Polish virologist Hilary Koprowski, a Jewish man who wouldn’t have been able to succeed if the horrific Nazi regime’s genocide was allowed to continue.

The students write, produce, film, edit and upload the video, providing judges with documentation from all stages of the project. Editing continues to this day.

Production created a team out of this group of friends, to the benefit of the students.

“Actually going through and making this video helps me come out of my shell a little bit more than I already have,” Weaver said. “Honestly, I don’t think I’d be who I am without these guys helping me.”

A club of friends

Rushing was grateful to the members of the club he’s graduating from.

“We’re all there for each other at all times,” Rushing said. “We all can match each other’s energy and chemistry. It’s like we’re all fitting the pieces of a puzzle and it fits perfectly. We all can match each other and it’s more than just a team. It’s more like a friendship and kind of a family.”

He added, “I also give them great guidance because of my old age. I’m like their sensei.” Grumbles from around the table from the younger students followed.

“This group by itself is like some of my closest friends,” Brown said. “So working with them is pretty easy.”

Tindle said the experience working with the team through TSA has helped them become better communicators and delegators.

“I feel like it’s really an exercise that helps us become better members of our team, and it’s an exercise that helps us become closer as friends and better prepare us for the workforce or other jobs when we’re older,” he said.

“They mean so much to me in my life, especially growing up not having too many close friends until them,” Hansen said. “Being able to just be a part of something and work with them to create something truly magnificent in my eyes has meant so much to me and I’m really looking forward to work alongside them more often.”

To help the club get to nationals in Washington D.C., donations can be made to the club’s GoFund Me at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-creston-robotics-get-to-nationals.