Casper School Named Employee Choice Winner in Samsung STEM Competition

CY Middle School was named the Employee Choice Winner in the 14th annual Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition. For this award, Samsung employees selected one Employee Choice Winner from the 10 National Finalists, awarding CY Middle School an additional $10,000 in prizes.

For the competition, CY Middle School students tackled the problem of food waste and devised a way to dehydrate and compress food waste into fuel pellets to be used as an alternative fuel source or even chicken feed. CY Middle School presented their STEM solution to a panel of judges during a live pitch event on April 29th in Washington, D.C.

The pellets were tested for BTU rating and ash content and were proven to be a viable source of burnable fuel.

The final step of the Engineering Design process -once the prototype was created and proof of concept was determined, was to communicate the idea to interested stakeholders. Community members and representatives from local businesses came and listened to the idea.

CY Middle School alone says they waste about four tons of food each year. That's not including the Elementary schools, High schools and other Middle Schools in the district.

Their studies show the schools can make more than enough product to be reused into a valuable commodity for fuel and livestock feed.

"Research shows that even though we are only one school, we can have an impact on the amount of food going into the landfill. Just imagine what we could do when we scale this up to include our entire city" they said in their Samsung video.

Their hope is that an investor will take their idea and run with it.