‘PawPort carries high school team to national title

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, July 7, 2026

Four Wildcats’ designing and engineering skills earned them first place and plenty of airtime at a national competition last month.

Ivan Perez, Malaina Yergo, Joel Christopherson and Lux Eby represented Oak Harbor High School and Washington State when they competed as team Smarts and Sparks at the Make48 Innovation Challenge in Atlanta. Teams from five high schools had 48 hours, spread over several days, to design, engineer a prototype for and pitch a product of their own creation.

Two television episodes featuring Smarts and Sparks in action will air on the “This Old House” Makers Channel on Roku and on the Make48 YouTube Channel.

The victory adds to the success of the high school’s Career, Technical and Engineering, or CTE, program, home to what team mentor and teacher Chris Whiteman described as the largest high school SkillsUSA chapter in the state.

SkillsUSA is a national workforce development organization for CTE students, and Make48 was held as part of the program’s National Leadership and Skills Conference.

Teams were tasked with creating a tractor attachment for farmers to use during long work days and could choose from one of six prompts each with a different goal for the attachment.

Smarts and Sparks opted to design a tractor attachment safely allowing dogs to tag along on their owners’ long days on farms. Their solution was the PawPort, a balcony-like platform that attaches to the rear of a tractor and gives farm dogs a safe place to ride while their owners work.

The team knew only that the challenge would involve agriculture ahead of time. Yet they had no issue brainstorming a product and bringing it to life. Christopherson felt he and his teammates were on the same page from the get-go.

Technicians milled around the floor of the Georgia World Congress Center, available to help teams use designing and engineering tools. Unlike their opponents, Smarts and Sparks did most of that work themselves. Doing so gave them a competitive advantage, they agreed.

“I think designing it ourselves did help some because we could actually visualize it and see it and we were part of the whole process,” Christopherson said. “So we had a better understanding of what we were doing and communicating when we were trying to make it and show it to the tool techs.”

That teamwork is a testament to Smarts and Sparks chemistry.

“We didn’t really rely on other people. We just all thought it out and worked on it,” Perez recalled.

That chemistry was intentional.

Whiteman said he recruited each of the students for his Make48 team with their strengths and weaknesses in mind; he became familiar with each of them after having them in class.

“That’s why the team has worked so well together,” he explained. “Because even though they’re all very different people, they all think very similarly, and I’ve been able to see that over the years.”

Their unflappability was already ingrained, too.

Yergo has spent the past decade competing as a cheerleader. Playing defense on the Deception FC soccer team, Eby is frequently pitted against top offensive talent from opposing teams. Perez, a NJROTC cadet at the high school, competed with the armed drill team in a national competition earlier this year. Enough success led Christopherson to nationals as a wrestler this past year.

Whiteman believes these experiences prepared the team for Make48’s highly competitive environment.

“They all perform under pressure really well,” he said. “None of them really had any tendencies where they just had any meltdowns or anything.”

Another national competition awaits Smarts and Sparks in September, this time in Missouri, where they will once again be tasked with innovation on a deadline. There’s little the team can do to prepare because the challenge remains a mystery until the competition begins. But Smarts and Sparks is looking forward to it.

“I’m confident,” Whiteman said.