Burgeoning Einsteins nab top prizes in Intel-Israel Young Scientists Competition
Tamim Zoabi knew that if he and his classmates could win at the Young Engineers’ Conference, it could mean a ticket to a better life, a coveted university scholarship for this truck driver’s son from a poor village in northern Israel.
No Arab team had ever won at the conference, a competition among Israeli high school entrepreneurs to come up with the best hi- tech startup idea.
Zoabi grew up a world away from Israel’s thrumming hi- tech scene, with its hyper- ambitious entrepreneurs and millions in venture capital. Though his school is focused on technology studies, it lacks many of the resources needed to help students develop the kind of app Zoabi and his teammates hoped to enter in the competition. Even reliable Internet access is hard to attain.
On the day of the conference, Zoabi’s team’s stood near a helmet that manipulated brain waves to alleviate depression and down the row from a prototype for a robot that detects land mines. Their presentation was a 3-D diorama of a neighborhood with a toy firetruck.
When the judge’s verdict was announced on February 23, Zoabi and teammates Ruaa Omari and Masar Zoabi (no relation), had achieved something unprecedented for a group of Arab students – they won third place.
“I’m always impressed by new things, technology, machines,” Tamim Zoabi said. “This was a surprise.”
Zoabi and his teammates are students at Bustan al- Marj Sci Tech High School, part of the ORT Sci-Tech network of high schools, which aims to narrow achievement gaps by providing science education to students of diverse economic backgrounds. Tamim Zoabi’s father is a tow- truck driver and seasonal farm laborer, while Omari’s is a handyman. Masar Zoabi’s father died this year, and her mother does not work.
“Most of the students, their parents don’t have higher education,” said Shada Omari, a teacher at Bustan and the team’s adviser. “They’re working in agriculture and industry, not in hi-tech or advanced things. If the students were in a population where the parents had higher education, they would have gotten further.”
Competitors in the conference work on everything from biomedical devices to military technology, but the Bustan team put its efforts into addressing a local problem. Each year, forest fires ravage the area where they reside, a cluster of impoverished villages near Nazareth in the Galilee. Sometimes the fires burn for hours before their local understaffed fire department is able to extinguish them.
At first, the team set an ambitious goal: To build a robot that could enter a blaze and begin to fight it. They were supposed to begin the project halfway through 11th grade, but their school couldn’t afford the necessary resources or budget class time for the project. So they scaled back, focusing instead on an app capable of locating the nearest fire hydrant and identifying the fastest route for firefighters to get there.
“It’s like Waze,” said Masar Zoabi, referring to the crowd- sourced traffic mapping app. “Waze helps people get to places they don’t know. The hydrant might be next door, or around the back, and they won’t find it. This will show them the way.” ( JTA)
High school pupils who showed brilliance in the fields of mathematics, history and the life sciences took first prize in the 19th annual Intel- Israel Young Scientists Competition that concluded in the Knesset on Tuesday. The event began on World Science Day, March 14, the anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birthday.
The competition entry subjects were so complex as to be practically incomprehensible to the audience, understood only by the professors who judged the event. Roi Ya’acobson of the Jerusalem High School of the Sciences and the Arts, who dealt with metric rigidity, shared first place with Emi Cohen of the same school, who presented on manuscripts in the Middle Ages, and Liam Kimmel of Hasharon, who investigated a virulent exoY factor in Pseudonomas aeruginosa bacteria.
Sixty- seven entrants who created 49 projects competed for prizes, including the chance to represent Israel in the Intel- ISEF competition later this year. They explained their work to judges on Monday at Jerusalem’s Bloomfield Science Museum. The finalists were selected from among 210 projects in high schools around the country.
Jerusalemites were especially prominent among the top winners, who will receive academic scholarships, said Science, Technology and Space Minister MK Ophir Akunis, who congratulated the participants.
“I go around the country, in the center and the periphery, and especially in science classes I see genius and talent breaking out. You ensure our future,” he said. “Israel is a path- finding world power in many scientific and technological fields and a leader in innovation.”
Israel Academy of Sciences president Prof. Nili Cohen added that the young scientists “represent the nucleus of the next generation of scientists, and I am glad to see many girls here too. I hope their number grows by next year.”
The winners of the top three prizes included six girls and five boys.
Among the more practical inventions created by the competitors were medical technologies to help the blind, the elderly and the disabled, technology to improve the discovery of mines and a stethoscopelike device to detect leaks in pipes.