Funding, Grants & Awards
5 Schools Win Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Grand Prize
Schools from California, Mississippi, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington
have won the fifth annual Samsung Solve for
Tomorrow contest, a national competition created in 2010 to encourage
innovation while engaging students in hands-on science, technology, engineering
and math (STEM) learning.
Teachers from more than 3,100 schools across the United States applied to
take part in the competition. Contest organizers selected five teachers from
each state to submit a lesson plan describing how STEM could be applied to help
their local community. Organizers then selected one winner from each state to
receive a Samsung laptop and camcorder to create a video of their STEM
solution, and those schools also received $20,000 in technology for their
schools. The pool of contestants was further narrowed to 15 national finalists,
each of which received $35,000 worth of technology for their schools, and their
videos were placed online for voting. The five winners each received a technology
grant worth $120,000 and were invited to attend an awards celebration in
Washington, DC.
The grand prize winners are:
- Downtown College Prep in San Jose, CA,
for installing a gray water system to reduce water usage in single family
homes given the state's drought crisis;
- Nicholson Elementary
School in Picayune, MS for building a robot to survey and prevent
flooding issues due to storm drain obstructions;
- Galena High School in Reno, NV,
for using a 3D printer to design mobility equipment for students with
special needs;
- Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate
Academy in Erie, PA, for developing a vertical farming model to help
community members grow their own healthy, fresh foods in the high-poverty
urban area; and
- Hudson's Bay High School in
Vancouver, WA, for using mushrooms to improve recycling efforts and reduce
waste removal spending.
Northwest Pennsylvania Collegiate Academy won the Community Choice Award
with nearly 100,000 public online votes. Hudson's Bay High School won the
Samsung Employees Choice Award. The other three winners were chosen by a panel
of judges.
Videos about each of the winning projects can be viewed on the Samsung
Solve for Tomorrow site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].