By Nancy Koeneman
The concept is called an advanced prosthetic technology arm (APTA), a limb
using polymers, a shape memory alloy and nanotechnology.
A multidisciplinary research project at the UI? Not really, it's actually
an award-winning combination of science and imagination created by three
University High School students. And the award is not merely a blue ribbon.
Daniel Beedy, Balazs Bognar and Richard Lin will each receive a $10,000
savings bond for their education. University High has received a color TV
and a VCR and will get a copy machine. The prizes and recognition are given
through the Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision
Awards.
"We're all proud of it and we're all exhausted," said Dave Stone,
adviser to the students for the project and a biology teacher at University
High.
Although the three seniors began brainstorming early in the year, it took
several weeks of intensive work to complete the essay and storyboards describing
their idea, the APTA. "[The students] clearly put in over 100 hours
on it," Stone said.
The premise behind the competition is creating a vision of technologies
20 years into the future. The students write an essay and create storyboards
that describe the technology.
Beedy, Bognar and Lin used their shared and individual interests to create
the APTA concept.
"We looked into some scientific magazines and we saw that nanotechnology
and polymer scaffolding were breakthrough technologies," Lin said.
"Shape memory alloys are something that I was studying in class, so
we incorporated these things into the project."
They then divided up the research and writing, and compiled their efforts.
Their description of the APTA calls it a "biodegradable plastic polymer
form fitted digitally at the site of the injury. After the prosthesis is
grafted onto the body, nanomachines mimic the patient's DNA and regenerate
blood vessels and nervous systems, eventually replacing the polymer form
and creating a new limb."
The second stage of the competition began when the students were chosen
as finalists. Toshiba/NSTA gave them $500 to create a video about their
dream technology. Creating the video became one of the most challenging
parts of the project for the team. They struggled with the computerized
video transfer process, Stone said.
The video provided an overview of what the APTA could be.
"It was mainly about the different technologies - nanotechnology, shape
memory alloys and scaffolding polymers," Beedy said. "We then
showed a model of our finished product using computer animation and had
an interview with a prosthetist [a person whose specialty is the study,
use, design or manufacture of artificial limbs]."
The video took an extraordinary amount of time, Bognar said.
"There were several hundred hours of work on the video. The hours are
uncountable. We lost track," he said. "We were in school until
4 a.m. on the computers."
But the rewards are also uncountable. The three students, along with their
parents, and Stone, will be flown to Washington, D.C., this weekend for
a series of events that include the award ceremony Saturday. They will have
the opportunity to hear presentations from science luminaries, including
Paul Zaloom, Beakman of CBS's "Beakman's World"; and Nobel prize-winning
physicist Leon M. Lederman.
Takeshi Okatomia, Toshiba's Chairman and CEO, and Gerry Wheeler, executive
director of the NSTA, will present the awards.
More than 5,000 teams entered the competition this year; four teams were
chosen for first-place awards.
Although they are looking forward to the awards weekend, in many ways, it's
simply good to have the competition behind them, Stone said.
"We were so happy to have it completed, and so exhausted, that when
we got the phone call [that we'd won the award], we were relieved to have
it come to an end," he said. "This has almost become a part of
all of us.... [the students] did a superb job on this and it's nice to see
[the team] acknowledged as they are."
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