Three Oakcrest School sophomores were honored at a special awards ceremony on Wednesday, March 15 for their selection as a regional winning team in one of the world's largest student science and technology competitions. The three girls — Danielle Douez, Veronica Staré and Kelly Johnston — will now move on to the national round of the 2007 Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) ExploraVision Awards Program.
A total of 14,681 students participated in this year's Toshiba/National Science Teachers Association ExploraVision program, and Douez, Staré and Johnston were selected as one of 24 regional winning teams from a group of 4,700 entries.
The ExploraVision competition asks students to imagine ideas for future technologies that could exist in 20 years. The team is now creating a Web site to be submitted for national judging in May. The girls' award winning project was "Emergency Heart Attack Notification and Treatment System," or EHANT System, an ovoid device surgically implanted into the thoracic aorta heart valve that detects enzymes indicative of a pending heart attack, injects medication into the blood stream, and uses Blue Tooth technology and GPS to notify emergency crews of the patient's location and ailment.