High School Inventors Shine at NASA Summit
Posted on April 19th, 2010 by Jaimie Schock
As Popular Science magazine noted, a recent event for high school inventors from across America at NASA’s Ames Research Center was not your average science fair. The 2010 Conrad Spirit of Innovation Award Summit handed out top prizes of $5,000 in grant money to winners of four categories — aerospace, renewable energy, green building and space nutrition — while finalists received $1,000. Students also got to talk to potential investors, PopSci reports.
The four grand prize winners were:
- Team Falcon Robotics from Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, which designed a robotic assistant for astronauts that has a 3-D vision system to give human operators greater depth perception.
- Javier Fernandez-Han, a homeschooler from Conroe, Texas, whose ACWa system extracts potable water from surrounding air.
- Team Green Mast from Milken Community High School, a coed, Jewish school in suburban Los Angeles, which designed a multipart plan to improve their school’s environmental footprint. A key component, PopSci says, is placing wind turbines within concrete highway barriers that produce power by collecting the breezes of passing cars.
- Team AM Rocks from the Battle Creek Area Math and Science Center in Michigan, which came up with a nutritious, space-friendly food called the Solar Flare Star Bar. Ingredients: whole oats, dried fruit, puffed rice, vitamins, minerals and a dash of cinnamon. It also passed taste tests — Have these kids come up with the next Tang?
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Competitions for Students, Ideas & Inventions, NASA, Science Contest
