For the tweleth year we gave out the Butwin Elias Science and Technology Award! We received 4 projects and awarded $1,350. The winners of this years award are below:
First Place ($1,000): 3D Printed Catapult
The first place winner of the 2023-2024 BEST award was Bianca Lo with her 3D printed catapult. The instructable that details her winning project can be found here.
Second Place ($200): Crazy Car
Max Gregor won second place with his crazy car project. The instructable that he wrote to document his project can be found here.
Third Place ($100): Dog Prosthetic
Allison Watkins won 3rd place with her 3D printed dog prosthetic. The instructable that she wrote documenting it can be found here.
Fourth Place ($50): E-Commerce Website
Shariah Yearwood won 4th place with her e-commerce website.
Speech Given At the Awards Ceremony:
Adam Iseman gave this speech before giving out the awards:
Thank you for the introduction! I’m Adam Iseman and I’m here on behalf of the Iseman Foundation to present the 12th annual Butwin Elias Science and Technology or BEST Award and the 8th 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 of their choosing. And before we give them out I just wanted to take a moment to talk about how our world is being transformed by advances in both of these fields.
For most of human history whenever we wanted to build something we had to go through a painstaking process of chiseling, carving or machining a finished product from a larger chunk of material. This is completely different with 3D printing. When you 3D print something you design a digital model, hit print and then get a physical object. When I went to high school at Meyers 3D printing was a thing that was mostly confined to research laboratories and high-tech companies. Our woodshop had a single computer controlled milling machine that was locked away in a secure room since it was so expensive and dangerous to use.
Now the STEM academy has a dozen different 3D printers and half of the projects we got submitted for the BEST award this year feature 3D printed parts! The same technology that I’m using to prototype a weeding robot and that researchers are exploring to someday print replacement human organs and print houses on other planets, students are using every day here! This is an amazing technological shift in just a few years and I’m really excited to see what awesome things these students accomplish with the skills they have gained with this new technology. The reach and impact these new improvements can have is greatly increased due to the second major thing transforming our world.
I was 4 years old when the world wide web protocol was released and started the modern internet. For just about all of human history the reach and impact that a single thing posted on the internet can have was impossible to achieve. The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous works of art and is only seen in person by about 10 million people a year. A single Mr Beast youtube video last year was viewed by 46 million people in a single day! The internet has changed just about every aspect of our everyday lives including how we make and distribute art. All of our Arts Award projects are submitted online and while they probably won’t get as many views as a Mr Beast video they can be instantly accessed by any of the 5.4 billion people that currently use the internet!
I’m honored to be able to facilitate these students sharing their art in a way that has never before been possible. I’m looking forward to seeing some of their future work being shared around the world and maybe going viral if they stick with it!
And now let’s get on to actually presenting this year’s awards!