CY Middle School students receive national recognition for Solve For Tomorrow project

CASPER, Wyo. — A team of students at CY Middle School is a finalist in a nationwide competition after its members built a robot designed to help lift people’s spirits and improve mental health The team was recently named one of the 10 finalists in the Samsung Solve For Tomorrow competition, and will fight to take home the top prize later this month.

“We know that mental health is a really big issue,” student Alli Nielsen said. “A lot of times people say that to fix mental health, you need something big that’ll do it all at once. But we think that even small things to brighten someone’s day can make a difference.”

After taking the top prize in the statewide competition, the CY Middle School students advanced to the national stage, where their robot — which they dubbed the SEL-bot — was named one of the 10 best against teams from all 50 states.

The collection of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students created a robot that can tell jokes, give uplifting messages or advice, show various images designed to improve a child’s mood and more.

When it came time to turn their idea into an actual device, every student had a role to play, from coming up with the robot’s design to coding the device, constructing it, implementing a user interface and more.

Early designs were for a humanoid robot with legs, a head and more, though that idea was eventually discarded in favor of one that looks less human while still sporting a friendly face.

“We started from scratch, just sketching out a few different ideas,” team member Piper Jurgensen said.

The jokes, images and more were mostly sourced from the internet, though Liam Morton added that team members came up with some of the jokes themselves.

The SEL-bot was coded with the Scratch programming language. This allowed the students to ensure that users of the SEL-bot would see as little repetition as possible.

“We programmed it so that each thing corresponds to a number. When you press a button — either for a joke, quote or whatnot — it selects one of those numbers at random,” Morton said. “There’s a block in Scratch that randomizes it, to make sure you’re not just getting the same joke over and over again.”

In all, it took the students a handful of weeks to build the prototype, team member Fred Bach said. The wiring and construction of the base took one to two weeks, with the addition of the hull only taking a few days.

“It was really fun seeing everything come together little by little,” team member Timothy Eddington said.

“I’d done stuff like this before, but never anything this complex,” added team member Laramie Huff, who worked on wiring the robot. “It was a bit challenging at first, but it was fun and I feel like I learned a lot.”

Even after their prototype won the state contest, the students continued working on and tweaking the SEL-bot.

“What we took to the state competition was just a prototype,” said Desiree Riley, a CY Middle School teacher who oversaw the project with fellow teacher Christy Rodgers. “By nationals, we’re going to have the finished product ready to show off.”

Among changes still being made are updates to make the UI more user-friendly, as well as additional things for the SEL-bot to say and show.

“We’ve changed how the buttons look twice, changed how they work and added more outcomes,” team member Bentley Bray explained.

Landon Bowman said the team is also gathering data from students outside the project to help refine it further.

“We’re going to put it in the classrooms for students to use, and then we’ll have a little survey for them,” he said. “Questions will ask how they felt before and after using it, how many times they used it — things like that. That should tell us what sort of work we still need to do and if there’s any issues with the coding.”

The national finals are scheduled for April 27–29, where Eddington and Bowman will make the case for the SEL-bot to a panel of judges.

“We’ll explain how it works, and how we want to help make everyone’s mental health better with it,” Bowman said.

While the winners are determined by a panel of judges, Riley said there is a People’s Choice Award that people can vote on here. There are several other award categories as well, such as a Sustainability Award, an Entrepreneur Award and more.

CY Middle School received $50,000 for qualifying in the top 10, and Riley said there is the chance for more financial prizes if they win other awards. All money won from the competition goes directly back to the school itself, and Riley said the teachers overseeing the project are able to decide where that money will go. In the past, funds have been spent on laptops, equipment for various science projects and more.

CY Middle School boasts a strong track record in the Samsung Solve For Tomorrow competition. In recent years, the team has won the statewide competition three times and qualified in the nation’s top 10 twice.

“I think it speaks to the excellence here from the top down, including the administrators, the teachers and of course the kids themselves,” Riley said.

Rodgers said she feels good about her students’ chances. Regardless of how they ultimately place in the competition, though, she said she’s already as proud as can be.

“I look at them all the time and just think, ‘This is middle school?'” she said with a smile. “What they’re doing is just so brilliant. … I’m lucky to be their teacher.”