Old Lyme — The TechnoTicks robotics team at Lyme-Old Lyme High School is aiming high — about 60,000 feet up, if you want to get technical — now that they've spent the year creating a satellite and trails app designed to bring attention to the area's natural resources.

Test launches of the Satlyte took place in May, with the compact cube satellite attached to a weather balloon roughly 5 feet in diameter. The goal was to collect information about weather, air pollution, trail conditions and more that could potentially be used in concert with the Trailyte app.

The club, which began in 1999, now includes students from Lyme-Old Lyme High School and East Lyme High School.

The project started last fall, when coronavirus restrictions prevented TechnoTicks members from meeting in school after hours. Instead of focusing on robotics competitions, the team met a challenge presented by the FIRST Robotics organization to work remotely to identify a problem and design a solution that helps people stay physically and mentally healthy amid the pandemic.

The problem, the TechnoTicks decided, was being stuck inside. The solution was encouraging people to use the many trails in and around Old Lyme that provide a ready opportunity to engage with nature.

Eleventh grader Abby Speckhals, who took the lead on the app development team, said she liked the idea of using the year to provide a service for the community at large.

In a typical year, the team would be building an industrial-sized robot and pitting it against other teams in field games.

"The robot was definitely fun and I'm very excited for another normal season, but it's more of a competition and not something that impacts other people," she said.

Speckhals and her team used an app development program to build Trailyte, which allows users to log in to access information about the trails and record their progress. While the project remains in the beta stage and didn't make it into the app marketplace this year, Speckhals said the effort to reach out to the community was "something different" that enhanced the robotics team's experience.

Anna Davis, a sophomore, headed up a satellite team that used computer-aided design, or CAD, software to create the circuit board and housing for the Satlyte.

Cube satellites gained international attention last month for lighting up the night sky after Elon Musk's SpaceX company launched more than a thousand of them into orbit as part of a plan to bridge the digital divide and bring internet access to underserved areas of the world, according to the Associated Press.

TechnoTicks adviser and technology teacher Bill Derry said the cube satellites are being used for a wide variety of purposes, including monitoring conditions of global warming.

The Satlyte isn't meant to bridge the digital divide, but is intended to take digital pictures that can help assess things like what species of trees dominate the trails, whether ponds are expanding or contracting, or if there are any invasive species coming in. The cube satellite also can measure things like carbon dioxide to better understand air pollution.

Online CAD software helped Davis and her team build the satellite from the inside out as they worked remotely via the video conferencing platform Zoom.

"With my CAD drawing, we were able to create our own printed circuit board that allowed us to easily organize all the parts and components inside our CubeSat and minimize the wires and mess," she said.

They also designed the plastic housing for the satellite and a plastic harness to hold the satellite when students finally send it up for an untethered launch, possibly in the beginning of the next school year.

Davis said the team hopes to take a "road trip" to upstate New York to send the cube satellite, fitted with a GPS device, on the weather balloon with a destination 60,000 feet into the atmosphere.

With the balloon designed to pop at a certain altitude and the parachute set to stay closed until a certain point, the satellite "would glide gently down to earth and we would be able to use our GPS to go pick it up wherever it ends up," she said.

The group's launch team calculated the satellite would be "pretty much guaranteed" to end up in the Atlantic Ocean if they launched it in Old Lyme, according to Davis.

The club's roughly two dozen members this year worked with mentors in the engineering field from companies like Electric Boat and Sikorsky Aircraft.

John Goss, the other TechnoTicks adviser and a technology teacher, described the mentorship aspect as one of key components of the robotics club.

"Where else can you work with an engineer who works on electrical systems for nuclear submarines or a mechanical engineer who designs helicopter blades," he said.

Derry credited the mentors with inspiring many students to take up careers in the STEM field, the now commonplace acronym for science, technology, engineering and math.

Both advisers have been with the robotics club since it began 22 years ago.

Speckhals and Davis said they both plan to pursue something STEM-related in college, though neither has narrowed down her field of study yet.

"Being on the robotics team has helped me realize how much I love working with these 3D modeling softwares and basically creating something out of nothing," Davis said.