Meticulous planning, two months of brainstorming and finding a project to help people around the world.
CHS9 students Atharva Negi, Vibhuvan Vemula and Vihaan Pathireddy together created Infravision for freshmen science fair, which uses infrared sensors, vibrations and buzzers to notify users who are visually impaired when an object is within 1.5 meters.
“We saw that with hearing aids, there is a lot of stuff for people who are deaf, and people who don’t have certain limbs have bionic arms,” Negi said. “There’s not much stuff for blind people.”
The three met in STEM class in eighth grade in Coppell Middle School West and became fast friends since.
Vemula brought the idea of participating in the science fair as a way to work together on a project and as experience for future years.
In the science fair, all students can select any science-related topic.
“A lot of students did AI projects this year so that’s the way we’re moving,” science fair sponsor and biology teacher Laronna Doggett said.
In freshman year, the fair is focused on picking a topic you are interested in and want to know more about and going through the scientific process. Students have the option to work together or independently.
“Some have prior knowledge or experience from middle school, so they extend their project to the high school, and for some it’s completely new,” Doggett said.
Many students started their science fair project, but never finished and saw it all the way through.
“It was nice to see they took the entire journey and went to district-level and regional-level competition,” Doggett said.
This year, no CHS9 students advanced past regionals.
While Doggett did not closely work with the students of the Infravision project, she said it could be used to better someone’s life.
“It would open up more opportunities for individuals that do have vision impairment to explore places that may be unfamiliar to them, or have new or different experiences,” Doggett said.
The project wasn’t easy for the three students and required brainstorming and trial and error.
“Most of the time the hard part was making the trifold and collecting data since we didn’t know how to properly collect it when it is mainly detecting obstacles,” Negi said.
A few days into the project they faced technical issues with some connectors failing with all systems. This is when Vibhuvan’s father Hari Krishna Vemula, who has worked with coding boards as a hobby for 15 years, guided them.
“They had a clear vision on what they wanted to do. When using these tools, especially for the first time, they needed some help,“ Mr. Vemula said. “They tried for a few days and I only came into the picture when they got stuck with something.”
Even though they did not make it past regionals the idea and meaning behind the project to help individuals who have vision impairment was unique.
“They had to do a lot of research and need some experience to get it done. It’s not a typical day-to-day expertise which is required,” Atharva’s father, Arvinder Negi, said. “But, they had the right thinking and direction.”
The boys intend to compete in the fair again in the future and have a better run.
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