INDIANAPOLIS — Three Indiana high school students are currently in Washington as part of a select group of national STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) champions.
Their change-making projects are inspiring Indiana.
An all expense paid trip to D.C. this weekend is underway. More than 2,500 top STEM students applied to go. From that, 126 were named Explr's first National Stem Champions.
"All of their projects are rooted in wanting to help other people and just make our planet a better place, and 126 champions were like that," said Jenny Buccos, EXPLR founder.
Three of the student innovators are from Indiana.
Joshua Kim, a West Lafayette senior, is addressing the issue of counterfeit medicines.
"My idea kind of revolved around tagging every individual dose of medicine with an edible and invisible QR code, so it is kind of like a fingerprint on every medicine," said Kim, who will attend Northwestern University.
Gavin Ruan goes to high school with Kim in West Lafayette. A junior, he is focusing on using computer science to get food closer to those in need.
"My project basically is, what it tries to do is use machine learning to find the best places to build down food banks because basically in the U.S., food insecurity is a really big issue, an issue that was made worse as well by the pandemic," Ruan said.
Grace Choi is a senior at Bloomington South. Her passion is plants and growing plant-based medicines.
"This is an example of plastic mulch where studies found if plants are grown with this kind of mulch covering over them, it actually helps these plants grow better and I was interested in my project, seeing if I could do the technique of of ag-filtration and grow plants and grow medicine in plants with the covering of these plastic mulches, could I improve the yield of these medicines, and it turns out it did, so that was my project," said Choi.
While in Washington, the students will showcase their work with their peers, government and corporate leaders, with the goal of elevating and celebrating their ideas.