For the second year in a row, students from Wilbraham & Monson Academy earned awards at a contest billed as the world's largest science competition.
Three groups from Marissa Axtell's STEM 9 Physics classes were named honorable mention winners at the 24th annual Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision competition, which had a focus on problem-solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills.
"Throughout the second trimester, all students in STEM 9 worked in groups of 3-4 to tackle one of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges," Mrs. Axtell explained. "The students were tasked with envisioning and communicating a new technology that will exist 20 years in the future through collaborative brainstorming and research of current science and technology.
"This is an important competition for us to participate in because it teaches the kids about the engineering design process, and also gives them the skills of technical writing - putting their inventions and ideas into scientific terminology. They get to use their research skills in a scientific kind of way, as opposed to the other research they are doing in their other classes."
The award-winning groups, all members of the Class of 2019, were:
Maria Baltazar, Jada Childs, Alyssa Gaderon and Gordon Hertel: JAM (advanced brain scanner for cyberspace protection)
Julia Grocott, Maia Hutchenson-Jones, Yanjun "Lucy" Meng and Gianna Paroli: Changing the World One Swilter at a Time (purifying water in coastal regions)
Ania Axas, Adam Kugelmass, Abigail Lacey and Jack Woodbury: The Ez-Chip (internal blood pressure monitor)
"The teams really worked on their research and refining their product they were presenting to the ExploraVision committee," Mrs. Axtell said.
Alyssa's group selected JAM because they all knew the importance of cyberspace protection.
"It takes a scan of your face each time you do something that requires your credit card number or social security number," Alyssa said. "We tried to make it unique, like Apple did with its finger sensor. We thought if we could use the head structure and we could incorporate a scan that that would be cool."
Abigail's group developed a few options before settling on a painless internal chip monitor for measuring blood pressure.
"As we went through the process we realized the Ez-Chip was what we wanted to do," Abigail said. "It turned out well. We were proud at the end."
Maia's group decided it wanted to tap into one of the world's largest resources – salt water – and purify it.
"We thought it was interesting that since there is so much salt water, it would be good to use it (purified) instead of depleting all of the fresh water," Maia said. "There are areas with an abundance of salt water, and areas that don't have much salt water could use fresh water."