By Florida Catholic staff - Florida Catholic
MIAMI | Teams from three archdiocesan schools have been selected as regional winners in the 2017-18 Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVision competition. They are among only 24 nationwide selected to advance to the national competition.
Photographer: COURTESY PHOTO
St. Agnes Academy fifth-graders and ExploraVision regional winners, from left, Maria Ruiz Verjano, Sofia Aleman, Theo Waterhouse, and Federico Calzadilla with their Smart Staff project "to help blind people walk safely."
A team of kindergarten through third graders from St. Thomas the Apostle School, Miami, were selected for their Smart Toilet idea.
A team of fifth graders from St. Agnes Academy, Key Biscayne, were selected for their project, the Smart Staff.
And a team of 10th through 12-graders from Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, Miami, were selected for their project, MelaNOMORE.
All three were chosen from among 425 entries in Florida, and more than 4,600 nationwide. ExploraVision selects only 24 regional winners, one winner in every grade level in each of six regions.
The goal of the 26-year-old contest is to have students “imagine a technology 20 years in the future and use the scientific process to research and develop their inventions,” according to the ExploraVision website. The contest is a collaboration between Toshiba and the National Science Teachers Association.
The St. Thomas the Apostle team described their Smart Toilet as a way to “minimize the time it takes for someone who is sick to find out they are sick and to seek treatment… The Smart Toilet will analyze a person's urine and bowel movement. This will enable quick action when a problem is identified. We have a goal to save lives and ensure others get treated faster.”
The St. Agnes team described their project as a means “to help blind people walk safely.” They wrote: “… (T)he current White Cane helps them, but not as much as possible. That's why we are going to invent a new one called the Smart Staff. The Smart Staff has a camera and speaker that tells you what it sees, so you don't run into anything. It has a GPS that can navigate you, and many more remarkable features.”
Our Lady of Lourdes Academy’s MelaNOMORE is “a noninvasive scanner and cooling lotion kit that uses infrared technology to detect small changes in skin temperature to diagnose melanoma. Using infrared technology, the scanner will then detect the subtle differences in temperature hoping to identify areas of the skin with possible cancerous cells as cancer cells heat up faster than healthy body cells.”
St. Thomas the Apostle also received three honorable mentions: one for a third-grade project, the Alz-Reminder; and two for sixth-grade projects, The Kraken and X-Specs.
Our Lady of Lourdes Academy received honorable mentions for two ninth-grade projects, MUCUS-ALL and Oculus Melius; four 10th-grade projects, The Ecoshell, The Horus Insight, The Knee Guard, and The Slice Device; three 11th-grade projects, Adapt-A-Seat, AVPMonitor, and BACKey; and two 12th-grade projects, De Sal: Water Desalination System and hEARt rate Earbuds.
