12 May 2016

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, together with Hasbro, are pleased to announce the winners of NASA’s 2016 OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (OPSPARC). The contest called for students in grades 3 through 12 to “be the spark” behind innovative concepts for new uses of NASA technologies. To share their ideas, they designed digital poster boards, called glogs, using a cloud-based, interactive learning and multimedia platform made by Glogster.

This year, there are nine winners in the three age groups: elementary, middle and high school. Sophia Sheehan, a third grader from Incarnation Elementary School in Midlothian, Illinois, won in the elementary age group with her idea to use a solar panel to power a “blow coat,” which would use a blow dryer to keep a winter coat warm.
Heidi Long, Aubrey Nesti, Katherine Valbuena and Jasmine Wu won in the middle school age group with their idea to repurpose spacesuit material to create a lightweight, durable, compact tent. The seventh graders from Pacific Middle School in Vancouver, Washington, envision using the tents to shelter the homeless and refugees.

High school seniors Alexander Li and Isaac Wecht, together with sophomores Isabel Wecht and Jake Laddis, won the high school age group. The students envision repurposing technology from James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield, which keeps the optics of the telescope super-cold, to keep houses cool during the hot summer months. The technology would alleviate some of the need for air conditioners. The team hails from Tappan Zee High School in Orangeburg, New York.
The winners will visit Goddard for a workshop and awards ceremony held in their honor June 28 through 30, 2016. As part of the workshop, the winners will create their own public service announcement video with guidance from NASA video producers and actor Peter Cullen, the voice of the TRANSFORMERS character OPTIMUS PRIME. They will also go on a behind-the-scenes tour of Goddard and meet some of the top scientists and engineers at NASA.

The 2016 OPSPARC contest began in January 2016 when NASA and OPTIMUS PRIME asked students to create a glog that included information on NASA missions and spinoffs, as well as a video describing their unique ideas for a new NASA spinoff technology.
In response to the challenge, OPSPARC received more than 900 entries from students nationwide. A panel of OPSPARC judges from NASA scored the glog submissions and narrowed them down to 10 from each grade category (grades 3 through 5, 6 through 8, and 9 through 12) for the public to vote on their favorites. The voting period was from April 19 through May 4.

High school students, with the assistance of college student mentors, took OPSPARC a step further by developing their spinoff proposals in InWorld, a 3-D, multi-user, virtual world setting that uses computer-aided design (CAD) models to create engineering and business analyses of the spinoff concepts. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sponsored the InWorld portion of the contest.
TRANSFORMERS and OPTIMUS PRIME are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission.