Welcome, Guest!
ExploraVision '10: Three Uni teams win honorable mention
Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - 9:53am
EXPLORAVISION 2010 COMPETITION AT A GLANCE
What: ExploraVision is an international competition open to students in grades K-12 in the U.S., Canada, and U.S. territories that asks participants to envision a future technology based on current science.
Result: For the second consecutive year, one Uni team took first place in its region, and three others earned honorable mention.
Next Step: The team of juniors Eric Chen, Zach Korol-Gold, Chris Mathy, and sophomore Dax Earl will spend the next six weeks preparing a Web site explaining their project in greater detail; if they win the final round, they will each receive a U.S. Savings Bond worth $10,000.
What: ExploraVision is an international competition open to students in grades K-12 in the U.S., Canada, and U.S. territories that asks participants to envision a future technology based on current science.
Result: For the second consecutive year, one Uni team took first place in its region, and three others earned honorable mention.
Next Step: The team of juniors Eric Chen, Zach Korol-Gold, Chris Mathy, and sophomore Dax Earl will spend the next six weeks preparing a Web site explaining their project in greater detail; if they win the final round, they will each receive a U.S. Savings Bond worth $10,000.
URBANA — For the second consecutive year, three Uni teams have won honorable mention to go along with a regional championship in the annual ExploraVision international science and technology contest.
At the start of last week, biology teacher and ExploraVision adviser David Stone announced that juniors Eric Chen, Zach Korol-Gold, Chris Mathy, and sophomore Dax Earl had won a regional title in the Grades 10-12 Division of ExploraVision '10 for their project NIBEye: Neural Interfaced Bionic Eye.
At the end of the week, Stone announced the good news about the other teams, each of whom finished in the top 10 in Grades 10-12 of their region, which encompassed nine states and all of Canada. Earning honorable mention were:
- Sophomores Amalia Dolan, Aishwarya Gautam, Kathy Qiu, Marina Shah for their project ADAPT: Applied Data to Artificial Pollination Technology.
- Sophomores Rohit Palekar, Annie Rong, Anna Rubakhina for their project iDISPOSE: Plasma Arc Trash Destruction Technology.
- Seniors Tej Chajed, Daniel Pearlstein, Elizabeth Russell, and Andrew Weatherhead for their project Pollin8R: Artificial Flying Pollinator of the Future. Chajed was a member of last year's international first-place team in the Grades 10-12 Division along with fellow Uni students Isaac Chambers ('09), Daniel Cheng ('10), and Danny Ge ('10).
This year's regional championship team of Chen, Korol-Gold, Mathy, and Earl will spend the next six weeks preparing a Web site that will explain their proposal in greater detail, incorporating video and discussing both the negative and positive impacts of the proposed technology on society.
Their project is a prosthetic eye that can restore vision to those affected by blindness, integrating several flexible, biocompatible alloys and lenses to create a natural-feeling, high-resolution artificial eye.
As regional champions, the team members have won a Toshiba notebook computer for the school, and a gift for themselves and their supervising teacher, Stone. If they win the final round, each team member will receive a U.S. Savings Bond worth $10,000 at maturity. Overall winners are scheduled to be announced on April 30.
The competition, now in its 18th year, is sponsored by Toshiba and administered by the National Science Teachers Association.
Every year, ExploraVision attracts up to approximately 20,000 K-12 students, with about 12 to 20 Uni students participating. The competition asks students to imagine a future technology by building on current science.
