Each year, the Fly Your Ride! STEM challenge at the San Diego Air & Space Museum encourages students throughout Southern California to push the limits of their creativity and problem solving while engineering their own flying car.

Generously sponsored by SDG&E, the ISTAT Foundation, and the Kenneth T. & Eileen L. Norris Foundation, Fly Your Ride features distance competitions, as well as awards for Creativity in Engineering and Creativity in Design.

In the middle school division, the first place winner in the distance category was the team of Riley Hughes and Michael Taylor of Joan McQueen Middle School, setting a new Fly Your Ride record with a distance of seven and a half feet. Sarah Kogelman and Christina Nguyen, both of Marshall Middle School, took second and third place, respectively.

The Creativity in Engineering award in the middle school division went to Lucas Vontsolos from Marshall, and Cassandra Ferguson, also from Marshall, received the Creativity in Design award.

In the high school division, the first place winner in the distance category was Hayden Loarie from Granite Hills High School, with an impressive flight of seven feet. Michael Howo from Scripps Ranch High School came in second, and the team of Jason Nguyen and Jackie Le from the Preuss School at UCSD placed third.

The team of Neo Chen and Matthew Li of Torrey Pines High School garnered the Creativity in Design award. The team of Amari Henry and Solyana Michael of the Preuss School at UCSD won the Creativity in Engineering award, and Brandon Sosa, also of the Preuss School, earned an honorable mention in the Creativity in Engineering division.

A total of 320 teams entered Fly Your Ride this year, including 287 middle school (Grades 6-8) and 33 high school (Grades 9-12) teams from Southern California. In all, 426 students, including 355 in the middle school division and 71 in the high school division, submitted blueprints for Fly Your Ride.

Registration for the annual Fly Your Ride competition typically runs from October until the following January, followed by judging of the entries from January to March. The Fly Your Ride finals at the San Diego Air & Space Museum happen each April to May. Each year, more and more teams from middle schools and high schools from the San Diego region and beyond enter Fly Your Ride. School districts outside San Diego County have taken notice of the Fly Your Ride and have started creating similar competitions in their school districts.