At Valley Christian High School in San Jose, a team of students known as Wildfire Quest is racing against time. They've advanced to the semifinals of the prestigious XPRIZE Wildfire competition and have just days left to demonstrate their autonomous wildfire suppression system in a live-fire test before a panel of judges.

The team, part of VCHS' Applied Math, Science, and Engineering Institute , is made up of twenty students, some of whom have been working on the project for the past four years. Their concept, a modular system of towers, drones, and base stations capable of detecting and extinguishing wildfires autonomously, was developed from scratch.

“Initially, we didn’t have any guidelines,” said Vishnu Parthasarathy. “We didn’t know what the requirements would be, what the con

See Full Page