At the competition, held April 24 at The Tech Museum of Innovation, a team of pirate girls calling themselves "Beyond the Horizon" made a valiant effort to retrieve a plastic fish from a 60-gallon tank with a battery-operated vehicle they'd designed and built themselves. Although they managed to snare the fish in their net, it escaped before they could return it to shore within the three-minute time limit.

Nevertheless, the members of Beyond the Horizon—Maggy Tjin, Sophia Tieu, Jessica Sun, Margaret Nguyen, Anna Viet and Hima Venigandla—found their creativity rewarded at an awards ceremony later that day, when they received prizes for best team costume.

Another Cupertino team, the Aquati-techs, was also honored for its artistic abilities. Team members Rohan Vaidya, Alex Calderon, Justin Alsamari, Donald Pham, Garrett Foo and Phillip Chang won the award for best team poster.

Judges handed out these awards in the marketing category, taking into account the fact that how a product is presented is almost as important as how it's designed. Teams were required to create a poster or an Internet-based presentation to let the judges know who their members were and which schools they represented.

The challenge itself was based on a real-world problem: the invasion of Lake Davis, a destination spot for trout fishermen in Sierra County, by nonnative, predatory northern pike. Currently, the state Department of Fish and Game is attempting to control the pike population, allocating $500,000 a year to the eradication of the species. But so far the department's efforts have not been successful. Tech Challenge teams were asked to create a device that could remove the pike using less manpower and less money.

Among the teams that built a better device was Finding Tino, whose members included Cupertino High School students Ryan Chen, Yu-Xuan Dang, Ouwen Liang and Arnold Pham. Finding Tino was named the second-best team overall after completing the challenge in less than three minutes. The team also received high marks for its design methodology review for keeping a journal that recorded evidence of its research, brainstorming, calculations, prototypes and safe construction techniques.

For some Cupertino High teams, just making it to the competition was a noteworthy experience. The members of Fish Fresh off the Market—Si Wang, Adrian Yee, Gary Button and Arjun Nair—were named the most courageous team for "persevering despite great setbacks that could have threatened their entry into the Tech Challenge."

Cupertino High School's 21 teams made up almost a quarter of the 87 high school teams that entered this year's competition. More than 200 teams in three age divisions participated in this year's Tech Challenge.