The Gould Academy engineering team earned first place April 10 and 11 in the remote-control high school division of NASA’s 2026 Human Exploration Rover Challenge at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The team designed and built rovers capable of navigating a half-mile course simulating the surface of the moon while completing mission-specific tasks.

The team was comprised of Maria Mangino (2028), Sean Xie (2027), Maeve Grocki (2027), Mateo Viniegra Ocampo (2026), Ezra Tsapis (2027), Ivan Prymak (2026) and Sonya Merkulova (2027).

Entering the competition was originally the idea of team leader Mangino, of Asheville, North Carolina. She heard about the competition during a CAD (computer-aided design) internship in New York last summer.

“During my ninth-grade year at Gould, there wasn’t really an engineering team,” Mangino said. “And when I heard about the competition, I thought, ‘We could totally do this.’ When we got in, it didn’t feel real at first.”

“Each member of the team owned their own part of the project, and they put in the hours,” said Billy Ayotte, director of the  IDEAS Center at Gould and engineering team mentor.

The first-year team took home multiple awards, including Rookie of the Year, the Task Challenge Award, the Industry STEM Engagement Award and the Most Improved Performance Award, at a ceremony in front of more than 500 competitors from 42 universities, colleges and high schools from around the world.

Prymak, a member of the class of 2026 from Dnipro, Ukraine, who piloted the rover, explained why the competition was so impactful.

“There are so many ideas on the table and you just brainstorm. You’re not going to get this by sitting in a classroom,” he said. “This is real experience.”