More than 600 teams of Santa Clara County students gathered at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center’s South Hall this weekend, eager to find out how the devices they built performed in this year’s Tech Challenge — an engineering showcase that has been a signature event of the Tech Interactive since 1988.
Someone’s who’s been there for all 38 iterations is Greg Brown, a San Jose engineer who helped found the event a decade before the Tech even had its familiar mango-and-azure building downtown.
Related Articles
Last hurrah for Joseph George Middle School in San Jose
Goodwill of Silicon Valley opening its first outlet store in San Jose
It’s going to be a festive Cinco de Mayo weekend in San Jose
Alcario Castellano, 90, used lottery jackpot to fuel community philanthropy
World War II airman’s remains receive a hero’s welcome in San Jose
Brown was a student at Stanford in the prehistoric days of the Tech and thought a fun way to promote the learning center’s potential was for young students try their hand at some of the same design challenges that college students worked on. The first Tech Challenge centered on building a device that could cross over a two-foot-gap between two tables. About a half-dozen teams showed up for those first finals.
“It sounds pretty easy, but it wasn’t that easy. That became the first criterion of the Tech Challenge: Make it sound deceptively simple,” Brown said, now 71. “Teams would see from their first try they had to go back and make it better.”
Nearly 40 years later, the Tech Challenge has grown exponentially but is still deceptively simple: This year’s challenge, “Gravitate to Navigate,” tasked teams — made of of fourth-graders to high school seniors — with building a gravity-powered device capable of traversing multiple tracks, forward and backward, while carrying a tennis ball.
Some teams managed to hit all the marks, but — as Brown quickly notes — that’s almost beside the point. Awards are also presented for interesting designs, journaling their progress, taking appropriate safety measures and finding a role for all team members. You can find out more about this year’s challenge, as well as see a list of award winners at www.thetech.org.
Another fun tradition at the Tech Challenge that Brown enjoys is the way teams come up with funny names or wear elaborate costumes to the showcase. He even takes part: Since 2008 or so, he’s worn a different hard hat each year with a creative, whimsical contraption related to that year’s challenge.
“As the event got bigger, people sort of looked to me sometimes to feel like it’s OK to have fun,” he said. “If I’m a goofball, other people know it’s OK to be a goofball, too.”
Brown — who worked for the Tech and later for the nonprofit Resource Area For Teaching — doesn’t foresee a time when he won’t volunteer for the Tech Challenge. When the finals end, he says goodbye to teams as they leave. Along the way, he’s heard stories about parents and teenagers bonding over the work, about former Tech Challenge participants who are now teachers or have kids of their own taking part. He says it’s not an easy event to produce each year, and he hopes people — especially corporate sponsors and other funders — realize what an institution it’s become.
“A lot of people in the community might not realize the profound impact this program has on the future lives of students,” Brown said. “The kids see themselves differently after they participate in the Tech Challenge. They realize they have more options than they thought they did. We’re helping young people at a very key moment in their lives, when they can make decisions and have insights about themselves that can affect them positively for the rest of their lives.”
ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY: Debi Pradad Sahoo is founder and CEO of Network Financials (NetFin), a San Jose software development startup. So it might surprise you that he thinks kids could use a break from all the tech in their lives. That’s why NetFin has launched “Unplug & Imagine,” an art contest that challenges elementary school students to use their creativity to make a piece of original art around the theme “When Screens Turn Off.” The biggest rule? The art has to be hand drawn, painted or colored — no digital tools allowed.
Ironically, while the art can’t be made digitally, it still must be submitted electronically by May 11. Awards — including $100 in gift cards — will be given to the top three submissions. Get more information at network-financials.com/trova-connect.
GO FIGURE: Retired Redwood City teacher Ron Gordon called me over the weekend to remind me that Monday was not only Cinco de Mayo, it also was Square Root Day — 5/5/25. Gordon started Square Root Day celebrations back on 9/9/81 and is hopeful he’ll still be around for the next one, 6/6/36, when he’ll be in his 90s.
And as he has before, Gordon is holding a contest to see who can involve the most people in a “Square Root” celebration. Entries can include creating the largest square root sign from people, serving root beer in square glasses to the most folks or cutting as many roots as you can into squares (well, cubes) for a square-root stew. There’s a cash prize — $552.50 — Gordon plans to split among the winning entries. You can check it out at squarerootday.net.