Teams from two Orange County schools were named Wednesday among 24 regional winners in a national science competition.
A team from Fairmont Private School in Anaheim and a team from the Orange County High School of the Arts were each named regional winners of the 20th annual Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision Program, described as the world’s largest K -12 science and technology competition.
The competition requires students to work in teams and design innovative technologies that could exist in 20 years. More than 4,800 teams with more that 14,600 students participated this year. Since its inception, more than 300,000 students have competed.
Each of the regional winners will now move on to the national phase of the competition, where they will compete to be named among the eight national winner teams, including four first-place and four second-place winners. Students on the four first-place ExploraVision national winner teams will each receive a $10,000 US Series EE Savings Bond valued at maturity. Students on second-place teams will each receive a $5,000 Savings Bond valued at maturity.
The team from Fairmont included four students from grades 4-6. They were Raj Sawhney, Riya Beri, Taylor Tran, Chloe Shin. Their project “Hearing the World’s Silent Side” was designed to help patients with deafness caused by auditory nerve damage.
The project used a mixture of two components: nanofibers used in Spinal Cord technology and a 2012 Cochlear Implant. In the project, the nanofibers were used to coat the auditory nerve. When sound waves entered the ear, they are able to bypass the nerve damage. Combining this nanofiber technology with the regular cochlear implant results in a perfect solution for any type of hearing loss, said Fairmont science teacher Kathryn Baham, who coached the team.
“I am so proud to be coaching this team of students. They are innovative thinkers who explore new ideas with enthusiasm. Cochlear implants and spinal cord procedures are complicated technologies to understand, but these students did their research and became experts on the topic, because they had a passion for helping the deaf to hear,” Baham said.
The team from the OCHSA included students Valerie Narumi, Nicole Larkin. There project was entitled Silent Wave Examination & Energy Therapy. It’s described as revolutionary long-term care product to noninvasively diagnose, monitor, and treat brain and spinal injuries and diseases.
The students will each receive a Toshiba Camcorder, and OCHSA will receive a Toshiba Laptop Computer to be used by the students for the second phase of the competition. The second phase of the competition asks students to build a prototype and design a website to describe the technology they designed. Toshiba representative Rose Mary Moegling will present the students with awards in a special ceremony on Monday, in coach Sally Lopez’s science class on the OCHSA campus.
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