Teen tackles car blind spot woes, wins $25K prize

Alaina Gassler often saw her mother growing frustrated with blind spots when driving the family’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee in their Pennsylvania neighborhood.

The issue inspired Gassler, 14, to design a system that uses a webcam to show anything that might be blocked from a driver’s sight.

A panel of scientists, engineers and educators was so impressed with her prototype that she won the $25,000 top prize at the annual Broadcom MASTERS competition in Washington recently.

“I was shaking so much when they called my name because I did not expect it at all,” Gassler said.

She beat 29 other middle school students in the science and engineering competition, which drew 2,348 applicants nationwide. The Broadcom MASTERS, or Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars, is an annual competition from the nonprofit Broadcom Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public.

Her materials included a projector, a webcam and reflective fabric. After attaching a webcam on the outside of a car’s A-pillar on the passenger side, a projector was mounted underneath the car’s roof “to project the image onto the pillar or the blind spot,” she said.

To help the image become clearer and brighter, she applied reflective fabric on the pillar so that the image can be seen only by the driver.

“I would love to show my project to Tesla, because they are always looking for ways to make their cars safer and they are always looking for more futuristic features to put in their cars,” she said.