With spring rapidly approaching most students are counting down the days until spring break, for the members of the BHS Real World Design Team spring break is the last of their worries.

The team members have been working furiously to prepare for the state and national competition.

“We started the challenge in late October,” junior Mackenzie Johnson said. “We have two meetings a week adding up to about four hours in meetings. Then we spend time throughout the week working individually. When the due date got close we were working every day at least two hours.”

The Real World Design Challenge is an engineering competition in which students across the nation are given the challenge of designing an efficient, low carbon emission, and environmentally friendly personal light sport aircraft.

The team had to submit their final documents for the state competition by midnight on Wednesday, Feb. 8. BHS has created a dynasty at the state level, no one in the state of Kansas has beat them.

“The State trophy is a traveling trophy,” sponsor Pam Davis said. “Which ever school wins the state title gets to keep the trophy until the next year and it will go to the next school who wins. We are the only school to ever have that trophy and we’d hate to see it leave.”

For most kids the length of materials submitted for the state challenge would seem outrageous but the kids on the Real World Design team do not think twice about it. They are already thinking about nationals.

“For the state challenge we are judged only on the design document we submit,” Johnson said. “It follows a rubric that is ten pages long, and the final document was about 80 pages. We will find out sometime next week if we won state and the national challenge is issued on Feb. 27.”

The Real World Design Challenge has many difficult aspects.

“I would have to say time management (is the most difficult aspect) because most people are involved in some sort of out of school activity, and finding time to work on it is difficult,” junior Austin Kraus said.

If BHS takes the state title again they will go to Washington D.C. April 20-23 to compete in the national competition where they have won the national title and come in third in the past two years.