The 2015 White House Science Fair became a gathering ground for young scientists developing new experiments and demonstrations covering a wide field of scientific disciplines. President Obama was the guest of honor at the event, which brought together young people from around the nation.
Obama also announced more than $240 million in private sector funding to encourage youngsters to participate in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) research. The "Educate to Innovate" campaign has already raised more than $1 billion dollars in cash, materials, and services for STEM programs aimed at budding scientists around the nation.
A total of 120 universities around the country have committed to train 20,000 young engineers to solve many "grand challenges" of the 21st century. An additional 1.5 million students will be trained in STEM programs, thanks to Change the Equation, sponsored by a coalition of business leaders.
The Let Everyone Dream Campaign will bring STEM education to many underrepresented youth, who may otherwise not have the resources to study these fields without the funding. Philanthropists are donating $150 million to train young people in the study of mathematics, science, technology, and engineering. The Department of Education has announced five-year grants to support the creation of new educational programming on television aimed at encouraging learning, particularly about science.
"If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you're a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too," President Obama said.
More than 100 students from over 30 states took part in the event. The contestants were invited to the White House Science Fair from more than 40 competitions and organizations around the country. Many of these contests were sponsored by the federal government, while the remainder were private events, or held by local school districts.
Exhibits shown at the science fair include a smartphone application called Rethink that alerts teens when a message they are intending to send contains language that may be hurtful to the recipient, as a means of reducing online bullying.
Kelly Charley, a 15-year-old budding scientist from New Mexico, developed a solar-powered device that circulates air and heat around buildings, to provide warmth to people who live in areas were electricity is unavailable, or prohibitively expensive.
For young people who exercise regularly, Maureen Botros of Kansas has designed Illumi-cize, jewelry that flashes and changes color based on heart rate and physical activity.
A group of Girl Scouts, all aged 6 from Tulsa, Okla., designed a device made of Legos that turns pages of a book for people with physical challenges leafing through pages.
"Anvita Gupta used machine learning to 'teach' a computer to identify potential new drugs for cancer, tuberculosis, and Ebola. She combined artificial intelligence techniques, 3D visualization, and biomimicry to systematically discover which drugs might inhibit the interactions of intrinsically disordered proteins with other proteins," the White House reported. She is from Scottsdale, Ariz.
President Obama viewed several of the exhibits, as 35 teams of students displayed their works at the White House.
