On Saturday, March 15, I went to the Massachusetts Regional Science Fair. In order to qualify for the state level competition I needed to get top 40 of all the projects. I had three separate judges, an Electrical Engineer from Umass Amherst, an undergrad from Tufts, and a programmer from a robotics startup in Cambridge called Jaybridge Robotics. My project was against the wall because it needed electricity, and thats where all the cool projects were in my opinion. After all the judging I was able to look around and check out other kids project and was a little intimidated by the projects that have not one poster board, but two poster boards stacked on top of each other. The Awards ceremony come around at 3 and I was getting nervous as the 40 places countdown until we get to third place. There was only two kids including me from my High School competing, so when the called my High School for 3rd, I thought it was for me, but was greatly disappointed when it went to the other girl at my school for her Green roof project. Then 2nd place was called and I was ready to leave when the called 1st place and I won! I received not only a check for $500 dollars, but a trip to Los Angeles to represent Massachusetts at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair and to go the State level competition! I was ecstatic and still can’t believe it.
After the Regional competition, I then moved on the state level fair at MIT. At this competition, I really didn’t know what to expect because it was my first time doing a science fair competition. I set up my board and my robot, made sure everything was working, then started to walk around and converse with other students. I really enjoyed seeing other kids that shared the same interest as mine, especially the engineering projects. At 9 o’clock the judging began and I had a lot of them. I was scheduled for around 6 of them I believe, but there was a lot of other judges that came up to me and asked me to tell them about my project because they were intrigued. At lunch time I was called up for a quick information session about the International Science and Engineering fair trip and I got to meet who I was rooming with in Los Angeles, Greg. After the meeting the judging continued and then at 3 o’clock we went to the auditorium for the awards ceremony. Since there were so many students attending the event they gave 20 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place, 4th place and 5th place awards. In addition to the award there are other awards given out to specific types of sciences. I was awarded the first place award alongside a $65,000 scholarship to Regis College and the American Society of Safety Engineers Award.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and I am heading out to LA with 20 other students from around Massachusetts for the International Science and Engineering Competition. This competition is sponsored by Intel and there are over 1800 students from over 80 countries present. This competition was one of the best experiences of my life. During the week we did a lot of things like touring Museums and the city. One of my favourite parts of the trip was meeting students from other countries. I loved being able to sit down at lunch with a kid from South Africa or any country and being able to talk about foreign politics or stereotypes of Americans. Going to ISEF was probably one of the best experiences I have had in high school and I hope to go again next year!
Top photo is a picture of kids from Brazil and I. The last photo is a picture of students from United Arab Emirates and I.
For my project I built a teachable robotic arm that was intended for factory use. So if the factory needed to change an item that was being say placed into a box instead of having to re-program it by hand the factor worker could show the robot manually what to do in order to save time and money. Basically what I did was build a 6 degree of freedom robotic arm with 6 analog feedback servo’s from adafruit, an arduino uno, 2 push buttons and a 5v regulated power supply. For my information please check out this page.
