Los Altos High School’s Team Olympus won the top prize - Best Overall Solution - out of 81 teams in the high school division in the Tech Museum of Innovation’s 18th annual Tech Challenge April 30 in San Jose. The school took the same prize home last year as well.

The goal of each Tech Challenge is for students to collaborate to try to solve problems that stump adults in the real world. This year, teams of nearly 1,000 fifth- through 12th-graders from local schools engineered devices to extinguish a simulated wildfire.

The “Battle the Blaze” challenge required students to design, build and operate a device that could retrieve one water balloon from a “lake” and deliver it to the designated target, a simulated fire on a ridgetop. Along the way, students learned about wildfire prevention and the impacts of wildfires on the environment.

Castilleja Middle School’s team, Pineapples Under the Sea, won Best Overall Solution in the middle school division. The Bunny Wrenches of Egan Junior High School tied with Castilleja, a private school in Palo Alto, for the grand prize in Best Overall Device Demonstration. The Egan Extinguishers won the Judge’s Choice Award.

The winners were honored for their fast completion of the challenge, thorough design journals, costumes and overall spirit.

Team Olympus member Keith Loebner said his team took the prize again because team members had several years of experience behind them, their coaches are engineers and they were careful to address all aspects of the challenge.

“Not only did we have a solid, robust device that we fabricated and tested over many weeks of hard work, but we also had great team spirit, great costumes and a stellar notebook,” he said.

He credits team member Matt Widmann, “our notebook guy,” for the high marks the team earned in that category. “The judges even asked if they could keep his notebook to use as a benchmark for the future,” Keith said.

The team’s device, named Hades, performed “nearly flawlessly” - “an unlucky pick-up of the balloon was the only scare” during the contest, Keith said.

“Instead of getting a solid connection to the metal plate we attached to the balloon, our electromagnet lifted it up by only a corner. With it hanging like that, we didn’t have the necessary clearance or distance to get into the cup. Some quick thinking by Eric Rome saved the day, when he rammed the wheels forward into the ram and bumped the balloon into the cup,” Keith said.