Yes, if their school signs up and they have a teacher sponsor as a class or a club. HUNCH needs to communicate through a teacher.

Projects will be posted on the website at the beginning of August so teachers can look over the projects and begin with their students as early as they are ready.

Preliminary Design Review--Mentors and other engineers see the student's early, semi-functional prototypes and give comments and suggestions to improvements. This is done early in the school year--October to December.

Critical Design Review--Mentors and engineers listen to student teams and see the improved, functional prototypes from the PDR. This happens in late January to eartly March. The best projects are chosen to be invited to the Final Design Review.

Final Design Review (aka Final Design Showcase)--the best student projects from arround the country are invited to present their functional prototypes at Johnson Space Center to NASA engineers, scientists and astronauts. The next Final Design Review will be May 4, 2027.

Engineering is best done as a team. Every project needs to have a good looking brochure, a good looking presentation board or poster, people who communicate well with different types of interviewers, and a good looking, functional prototype (lots of good diverse ideas helps for accomplishing this). All of this might be done with one very dedicated person doing all of these tasks but a good project is much better when there are multiple brains finding good solutions and allowing people to do what they are good at. Having partners and team mates is really helpful when someone gets injured or sick. Learning to work in a team and solving problems is what every employer likes to hear about. (What kind of employee would you like working for you?) Plus it is a lot more fun learning and working with someone else.

If you have gone through a year or more of CAD class and have good CAD skills, it may be valuable for you to get involved with the Flight Configuration program with Mike Bennett. Flight Config is where HUNCH takes projects from NASA or some of the past HUNCH programs and turns them into flight hardware so they can be used in training programs, go the the Space Station, be prepared for the moon. You will learn the skills to make NASA quality drawings and help engineer products to handle training or space requirements by using the correct materials and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products used in industry.