Finalist in CAD Engineering at 2025 PA State Technology Student Association (TSA) Competition!

R/C Car

One of the extracurricular activities I participate in is TSA at Downingtown West High School. This is an engineering focused club in which students work in teams and individually on a wide range of different projects.

A few of these project are CAD Engineering, Manufacturing Prototype, R/C Off Road, Architecture Modeling, Dragster, and Senior Solar Sprint. The are just a few of the near 50 competitions that TSA hosts.

My first year of doing TSA was in my freshman year of high school. At that time it was the first year that my school was running TSA so there was only a total of around 20 people in the club. For this reason, I was super excited to join TSA for the second year after having learned so much in my first year.

TSA Regional Competition

This year (sophomore) I did CAD Engineering, Dragster, and Manufacturing Prototype. In dragster the challenge is to make a 12in long dragster car from scratch out of balsa wood.

For Manufacturing Prototype, the challenge was to design and create a prototype of a picture frame that also serves another function. I decided my picture frame would serve as a phone holder that slides behind and to the side of the frame.

At regionals, I unfortunately did not place in any of these competitions but it was still an amazing experience and I was happy to be a part of it. However, that was not the end of the story for me as there was still the state competition in April.

R/C Off-Roading fun!

Hill we drove R/C off of

For the PA state competition, I decided not to do Manufacturing Prototype and I wasn't able to do Dragster because I did not qualify in regionals. Instead I competed in the following events: R/C Off-Roading, CAD Engineering, and PA State Logo Design.

R/C Off-Roading was a competition my friends and I were doing just for fun, which it ended up being one of the best parts of the trip! To tell this story it is important to know that the competition is held at a ski resort at the bottom of a mountain. So... as typical teenagers, we decided to bring the R/C car up to the top of the mountain after the competition was over and send it off the mountain. But this ended up being a great

experience for me because I got to learn how exactly an R/C car works when we took apart and reassembled the entire car (per the rules).

Logo design was a cool experience for me as a learned a little bit about graphic design and how to incorporate minor details into a larger design.

TSA PA State Competition - I'm a finalist in CAD Engineering!

Lastly my strongest competition was CAD Engineering. For this competition, we were given one hour to complete 4 select parts from an assembly (these were the hardest ones) and then if we completed those 4 parts we were given another hour to complete the rest of the parts and make drawings for each part. I ended up completing all the parts within the two hours (9 parts total), and was able to finish 5 of the 9 drawings.

For CAD Engineering I ended up placing 9th out of 80 which means I was a finalist for the state of Pennsylvania! I am super proud of this accomplishment as it was the first time I have placed for a competition in TSA.

Part 1 of CAD Competition