- May 27, 2026
Buddy Taylor Middle School’s SeaPerch club is headed to international competition for the third straight year.
This year, the club is sending three teams to the underwater robotics competition May 30-31 at the University of Maryland. On Tuesday, May 26, they held their last practice at the Palm Coast Aquatics Center before flying out for the competition on Thursday.
Alexander Mangal, the captain of the Oranges team will be competing at the International SeaPerch Challenge for the second consecutive year. Lucas Strunk, the captain of the Ammonites team, is also a second-time international qualifier. He competed two years ago when he was in sixth grade.
The BTMS SeaPerch competitors build their own remotely operated vehicles from kits donated by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Embry-Riddle also provides a tool bag with each kit, which includes power drills, pipe cutters, solder irons and hand tools.
“They have to look at a lot of different engineering skills, a lot of trial and error,” said BTMS teacher Tracy Jones, the club’s advisor/coach. “They really learn about buoyancy and drag in the water, trying to make their robot as fast as possible, but also making it so that it can still pick up objects from the floor, the heavy weights and the fish [cutouts] and different objects that they have to pick up.”
There are three parts to the competition. The mission course this year simulates storm response. The ROV must move objects and hook cutouts of fish, transporting them from one platform to another, all within a time limit.
The obstacle course tests high-speed maneuverability requiring the ROV to navigate the course as quickly as possible. The third part is writing a technical design report that describes the student’s unique ROV and its engineering design process.
Levente Beregszaszi, captain of the Great Whites, the third BTMS team heading to internationals, said the design report is his favorite part of the competition.
“It details how you made it and why,” he said. “It’s like eight pages, but it's very fun, because you get to write down your experiences from the club and really get to share how you thought.”
Each team can use only two people in a competition, a driver and a tether manager.
Last year, Mangal and teammate James Webb had the best showing of any BTMS team at internationals.
“We placed the highest in Flagler County history with my report being the second best in the state and 13th in the entire world,” Mangal said. “Overall we placed 22nd, and our mission course, which is task completion, we placed 23rd.”
This year, Mangal’s teammate is Indian Trails Middle School student Zachary Zelic, a firend of Mangal's who showed interest in the program.
The club was able to qualify more than one team for the first time because they competed in three regional competitions this year.
All nine of the local club members heading to internationals are eighth graders, but some, including Zelic, are new to the program this year. The entire Great Whites team of Beregszaszi, Ashton Barnes, Alexander Dattolico and Robert Peters are first-year SeaPerch competitors.
“All of us are new,” Beregszaszi said. “We had a lot to catch up on, for sure, but because of our teacher and our classmates, we were able to get a hang of the program pretty quickly. There were a lot of materials online, so we just read through them and were able to get a hang of the obstacle course, the mission course, everything.”
Strunk’s Ammonites team includes Nathan Cabrera Delombard and Noah Johnson.
“Our ROV has a lot of modifications in comparison to Alex and Leve’s,” Strunk said. “For one, it's a lot slimmer and has a pointed front, which in the obstacle course should hopefully allow it to go faster. It mainly consists of two layers. The top layer has that little point and the bottom layer has two straight arms that go just slightly past the top layer. And they have a cap with a screw drilled on them, so that with obstacles like the fish, we can fit the screws through the hole and pick them up that way, or we could scoop them in with both arms.”
Strunk said he loves how SeaPerch teaches general engineering and working as a team.
Perseverance is a very big part of this, because never once have we had a team that hasn't had a motor failure or a propeller fall off.
— LUCAS STRUNK, SeaPerch competitor
“Perseverance is a very big part of this, because never once have we had a team that hasn't had a motor failure or a propeller fall off,” he said.
Mangal said the club is bigger than ever with over 20 members this year.
“I helped promote it at community events,” he said. “And we went from single digits last year to over 20. But none of this would be possible without Ms Jones. Her leadership and guidance has really been what's helped us get this far, especially with three teams.”
Jones originally started a SeaPerch club at Rymfire Elementary School when she taught there.
“I did it for a couple of years, and then COVID hit,” she said. “And then I picked it up again when I moved over here to Buddy Taylor [three years ago]. The kids have totally rocked it. They do all the hard work. I make sure that they are safe with all the equipment that they're using, and when they start having issues, I'm there to help them troubleshoot, but they’re doing most of it.”
Jones, who also teaches an introduction to robotics class at BTMS, plans to pause the club at Buddy Taylor for next year as she plans to go on college tours with her son, a rising high school senior.
But the eighth graders, who all graduated middle school on Tuesday, hope to start a high school SeaPerch club at Flagler Palm Coast next year. Zelic, who will be attending Matanzas, hopes to also start one there.
“We're hoping that they can get a teacher to sponsor it,” Jones said.
