Mt. Hope High School’s 'Solve For Tomorrow' team is making a habit of winning. For the third time in five years, the club is representing Rhode Island in the national competition, sponsored by Samsung, that challenges middle and high school students to use STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills to engineer solutions to real-world problems. Any public school educator in grades 6-12 can organize a team and participate, regardless of discipline.

“This team has been working together since 8th grade,” said KMS teacher and Solve For Tomorrow faculty advisor Mary Cabral, of the team that includes many members of this year’s senior class, with plenty of underclassmen in the mix as well. An English teacher, Cabral enlisted science colleague Patricia Fillipino to join the group, enabling them to double the number of students who can participate.

Every year, the Solve For Tomorrow process begins in the same way — with “Think Tank.” The students come up with ideas to address problems they see in the larger community and then look at the data associated with those problems to decide how to approach a potential solution. One requirement is that the problem is having an impact close to home.

“We ask what problems exist in our community that we can wrap our hearts around,” said Cabral.

Award-winning innovations in years past have included a 3-D crosswalk, developed following a fatal accident on the East Bay Bike Path; and, on the heels of several drowning deaths in recent summers, a device to rescue people caught in rip currents.

At each stage of the competition, Samsung rewards finalists with technology for their schools. In the case of this year’s competition, the prototype device has been created on a 3-D printer that a past Solve For Tomorrow team won.

Solving a mobility challenge
This year’s innovation — for which the students have already won $6,500 worth of technology — seeks to address the freedom and mobility of residents of the R. I Veterans Home.

“A lot of the students on the team are musicians, and so they have gotten to know the residents of the Veterans Home through music,” said Cabral. “Plus, many of them are seniors, and so they wanted to impact the seniors in the community. They agreed they wanted to do something for the veterans, so they went there to observe and discover the challenges they face.”

One thing quickly became apparent: veterans appreciate their independence, but with their facility sited on busy Metacom Avenue, leaving the campus to head downtown, or even down the road, can be a hair-raising, anxiety-inducing experience. So the students came up with a multi-pronged solution: a device that both serves as a rearview mirror on a wheelchair or scooter, as well as a mobile command center for the vets’ phones. A companion app was developed that allows the vet to send a map with their location to Veterans Home staff if they have mechanical issues on the road or otherwise need assistance.

After several adjustments, the team has settled on a workable prototype.

“We’ve got one where all the components fit together,” said Thomas Quinn, a junior.

Though students were split into different groups in the earlier development phase, they came together when it was time to prototype.

“We had to all work together to make sure all the parts would work together,” said senior Alice Grantham.

Now that the initial prototype has been created, the students are collecting information on the specs of each veterans’ chair or scooter and phone, to custom-fabricate a device for each of them. They hope to present the devices to the veterans in April.

But between now and then, there is still a contest to hopefully advance in, and to that end, they have produced a three-minute video showcasing the product, edited by senior Mikayla Ricks. The next step is March 17, when they will find out if they advance to the next round of 10 state finalists. If they do, they will earn $50,000 in technology for their school, and advance to an in-person presentation in New York City where the 10 semi-finalists present their innovations and the top three will be awarded an additional $100,000 in technology. No strangers to victory, the MHHS team has already won $41,000 in technology over the past five years.

More importantly, according to Cabral, the students’ ideas have made a real-life difference. Though the state did not adopt the 3-D crosswalk technology the students devised, they did rework the vegetation and add signage at intersections along the entire length of the East Bay Bike Path, which was part of the solution proposed by the team. Responsive to the rip current lifesaving device, starting this summer there will be a rip current rescue device at every lifeguard chair in the state. In hopes of continuing to effect the kind of change that makes the community safer, the students have reached out to the state Department of transportation and Congressman Langevin’s office to request a sidewalk on Annawamscutt Drive.

“The veterans like to go down Annawamscutt to the water,” said senior Kristiana Cabral. “There’s no sidewalk there, and it’s not that safe.”

“They don’t necessarily go with the kids’ prototypes,” said Cabral, “but the kids bring the stakeholder awareness up, and the state responds.”