from the You-go,-girls! dept.
According to an article in the Tri-Valley Herald ("Students in finals of science competition", by Rebecca Emmerich, 20 March 2002), a local newspaper for the city of Dublin, California, a team of four fifth-grade students at the Quarry Lane School in Dublin have been named regional winners in the Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision competition. Their entry was a conceptual design for a "Nano Snippit-bot", a medical nanorobot that would operate in swarms to cut off the small blood vessels supplying cancer tumors. Their entry was one of only 24 selected from among those submitted by 4200 teams comprising 13,000 students from the United States and Canada to advance to the final round of the competition.
Two of the ten-year-olds on the Quarry Lane School nano-design team, Alejandra Dean and Nicole Rumore, have shown a strong interest in nanomedical robotics. In 2000, they and two other third-grade students at the Dorris Eaton School in Walnut Creek entered the design for a "Nano FatBuster" to fight atherosclerosis and heart disease; their visit with Foresight President Chris Peterson to gather information for the project was described in Foresight Update #42 (September 2000). The Nano FatBuster design also fared well: Out of 12,000 contestants, the quartet from Dorris Eaton School received an Honorable Mention Award. Only 2,000 of those were awarded.
Foresight applauds the dedication of Ms. Dean and Ms. Rumore, and wishes them and their team the best of luck in the final round of this yearís ExploraVision competition.
