2008 TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION AWARDS

TechColumbus is a local organization whose mission it is to accelerate the growth of the innovation economy by providing vital resources and assistance to people and enterprises that depend on technology to achieve their business goals. Each year it holds an awards ceremony to honor individuals and companies that continue to accelerate Columbus’s growth in the future of innovation. This event is about prestige and professionalism, showcasing excellence in leadership and technology. Winners are chosen in such categories as Inventor of the Year, CEO of the Year, Outstanding Technology Team and Green Innovation.
 

At the event, TechColumbus partners with COSI to present the 2008 High School Student Innovation Awards. The awards honor the best and brightest young science leaders who share their ideas and compete for the chance to win a scholarship for their college education. Two Metro students, Ronny Oppong and Joe Krajnak, submitted entries for the award and were chosen among the 5 top finalists honored at the event.

Ronny’s submission described how he used data visualization software called Starlight to interpret collected data. During his internship at Battelle, he was asked by the Ohio STEM Learning Network to design a project to show the educational use and benefits of Starlight. He conducted a survey to provide the data to interpret and visualize:

 
“This survey was a way for me to explore the youth’s views on the 2008 Elections because when you are 17 or younger, your thoughts and opinions have no effect in the choice of our government’s leaders. I also wanted to see the amount to impact our families and other personal preferences may have on which candidates we would have chosen. I selected the students of Metro High School to be the subjects of my project, because the students vary in age, socio-economic status, home district, race/ethnicity and personal views. These are some of the categories I would interpret and visualize using Starlight.”

Joe’s submission was an idea to create a self-healing circuit for USB flash drives to prevent loss of data due to the malfunctioning of the drive. 

“When a USB flash drive no longer works, I would at least like to have the data that was stored on it. To do this, the data needs to be collected from the computer memory chip directly. This process would be used to recover the most amounts of intact data from the now incomplete computer chip.  In other words, some of the data from the damaged chip would still be salvageable, much to the relief of the distressed user.”

Neither student won the $2,500 scholarship, but their ideas were recognized and each received a $50 gift card.