For the elevent year we gave out the Butwin Elias Science and Technology Award! We received 4 projects and awarded $2,250. The winners of this years award are below:
First Place ($1,500): RC Tank
The first place winner of the 2022-2023 BEST award was Michael Andrews with his RC Tank project. The instructable that details his winning project can be found here.
Second Place ($500): Grappling Hook
Zachary Myers and Alison Watkins won second place with their grappling hook project. The instructable that they wrote to document their project can be found here.
Third Place ($150): Pneumatic Actuator
Max Gregor and Harold Stella won 3rd place with his pneumatic actuator. The instructable that they wrote documenting it can be found here.
Fourth Place ($100): Mixed and Match It
Josadec Nazario, Cassandra Sipple, Mia Sperrazza & Christianna Barrera won 4th Place with their Roblox game. The instructable that they wrote documenting it can be found here.
Speech Given At the Awards Ceremony:
Adam Iseman gave this speech before giving out the awards:
I’m Adam Iseman and I’m here on behalf of the Iseman Foundation to present the 11th annual Butwin Elias Science and Technology or BEST Award and the 7th annual Caffrey Welles Fine Arts Award. We created these awards as a way to honor the awesome teachers that profoundly influenced my life and who are working every day to make their students’ better people. Before I dive into my speech let’s take a moment to give the teachers here today a round of applause for the amazing work that they do every day! These awards are our way of rewarding the hard work that students put into a science and technology or a fine arts project.
As with every award here tonight the success of the winners should definitely be celebrated but there are usually way more applicants that even though they worked extremely hard failed to win the highest honors tonight. I just want to take a second to talk about how important learning from these failures is. Failures are one of the most important things in life. Behind every single success story is a string of failures.
Ulysses S Grant was forced to resign from the Army before reenlisting and winning the Civil War and the presidency.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was rejected by 12 publishers before going on to dominate pop culture.
Steve Jobs got fired from Apple before getting rehired, launching the iPhone and helping to make Apple the first trillion-dollar company.
There are countless other examples I could list, including many of my own failures, but failing at something you tried your hardest on is basically a fact of life and there is nothing wrong with it. How you react to these failures is what matters. As long as you have the perseverance to not give up and to continue to learn from your failures you can accomplish amazing things! As a student at Meyers one year I could not figure out how to get the robot I was building for Science Olympiad to go in reverse. At Columbia I was unable to figure out how to get my senior project robots to properly communicate. And then at Apple I might have had some prototypes fail to work pretty spectacularly but I can’t really talk about that... These failure and many other robot related failures after them have led to me currently working on launching an autonomous farming startup based around a weeding robot. I really hope it doesn’t spectacularly fail but if it does I will learn as much as I can from it and continue trying to build awesome things.
The students that today are pitching a virtual reality marketplace for the BEST award might someday be the founders of the next app store! The students that submit a short story or a poem to this year’s arts award might be the authors of the next fantasy blockbuster! The student that submits a short YouTube video today might be the next streaming sensation. It definitely won’t be an easy overnight success story and there will be many failures along the way but I for one am really excited to see what amazing things every student in this room accomplishes!
Thank you for giving the time talk about the importance of failure but let’s get on to actually presenting this year’s awards!