Sparking Innovation

Travis Spark Challenge

The Annual Travis Spark Challenge is hosted by Travis Air Force Base’s Phoenix Spark program and Solano County Office of Education. High School students from Solano and surrounding counties visited Travis Air Force Base (TAFB) to participate. The competition provides students with fun, interesting, and challenging real-world problems to solve.

Twelve student teams from Golden Hills Community School, Will C. Wood, DeAnza, Buckingham Charter, Vacaville, Winters and Vanden high schools entered the competition where they were challenged to select one of three genuine issues that TAFB is currently trying to solve. The three challenge prompts included developing solutions for TAFB gate traffic flow, dining facility customer flow or flight line perimeter control.

The competition concluded with Winters High School earning the top spot with the highest score for the overall competition, incorporating a prototype for fingerprint checking at the gate. The Will C. Wood “Wildcat Garage” team won in the challenge category for gate traffic flow solutions. DeAnza High School’s “Air Force Jr. ROTC Deanza” team won the challenge category for flight line perimeter monitoring. The Golden Hills Community School “Eagles” team took home the top award for the dining facility flow challenge category. Each participating team presented creative and thoughtful solutions for the challenges and represented their high schools very well.