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<p>KINGSTON &#8212; Considering it&#8217;s a program run in the basement of a century-old building, the Meyers High School STEM Academy students proved age of a classroom isn&#8217;t a factor this week when they won the regional Governor&#8217;s STEM Challenge with a machine designed to pay for recycling plastic bottles and sheets of paper.</p><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a mobile recycling center,&#8221; senior Kenny Macko said of their winning invention, which looked like a large wooden crate. On top sat a small electronic scale, two switches, a keypad and a small tablet computer built on a Raspberry Pi.</p><p>That&#8217;s not a misprint, nor does their invention include a crusty dessert served in wedges. Raspberry Pi is a low-cost computer board that typical fits in a palm created by a charitable foundation in the United Kingdom specifically to get, as the foundation website puts it, &#8220;the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world.&#8221;</p><p>In this case, the Raspberry Pi built into a small tablet is used to calculate how much a student should get for recycled material and create a digital voucher to be redeemed later.</p><p>&#8220;It pays 5 cents per plastic bottle and 3 cents per pound of paper,&#8221; senior Kyle Ostrowski said &#8212; which explains the little scale for weighing said sheets of paper. One side of the top of the crate has a narrow slit for feeding paper sheets, the other has a round hole for plastic bottles.</p><p>Underneath those slots and hidden by the crate sit two Alcoa shredders to help keep the recycled material from filling the machine too quickly.</p><p>The shredders, it turned out, created an issue of their own.</p><p>&#8220;We had a problem with EMI messing up the Raspberry,&#8221; Macko said. For those non-fans of sci-fi movies, he was referring to ElectroMagnetic Interference. Turns out the hefty motors in the shredders were generating enough EMI to make the Raspberry computer act up. They fixed it with a little shielding duct-taped to the tops of the shredders.</p><p>The whole thing sits on wheels, thus the &#8220;mobile&#8221; part. The idea is to position them strategically in the school and thus encourage students to recycle. In fact, Macko and Ostrowski said, they hope to have a functioning prototype at Meyers before they go to the state competition in May at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster.</p><p>If they succeed with a working prototype, any money from the recyclables would &#8220;go to our cafeteria&#8221; Ostrowski said.</p><p>The model they brought to a competition at the Luzerne Intermediate Unit building was fully functional but definitely could use some tweaking. The hole for plastic bottles, for example, left the shredder mechanism fully exposed, so a necktie &#8212; or worse &#8212; could get sucked in.</p><p>&#8220;We definitely need to add some safety features,&#8221; Macko conceded.</p><p>Three other high schools sent five-member teams this year. Lake-Lehman offered a heater housed in a long metal cylinder intended to stand upright in the street, with a vent on top and a flexible tube at about chest height. The idea: to offer homeless people a chance to warm up in bitter cold. Ideally, the heater would be powered by solar cells, though this one plugged in.</p><p>That won second place. Tunkhannock Area took third with a proposed car windshield equipped with liquid crystals &#8212; the same technology used in flat-screen TVs and smartphone screens. The windshield can then be programmed.</p><p>The Pittston Area team offered a sprinkler system homeowners would install near their walks, but instead of watering the lawn it would spray a brine solution onto sidewalks frozen over by cold weather, allowing a person to melt ice without leaving the house. Ideally, it would all be connected to the &#8220;Internet of Things,&#8221; allowing a homeowner to trigger the sprinklers from anywhere using a smart phone.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Members of the team from Meyers High School competing in the regional Governor&#8217;s STEM Challenge Monday inspect their &#8216;Shredit&#8217; machine, designed to encourage students to recycle plastic bottles and paper. They won first place in the competition with three other high school teams and will compete in the state challenge in May. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/web1_image1.jpeg</photo0><caption0>Members of the team from Meyers High School competing in the regional Governor&#8217;s STEM Challenge Monday inspect their &#8216;Shredit&#8217; machine, designed to encourage students to recycle plastic bottles and paper. They won first place in the competition with three other high school teams and will compete in the state challenge in May. </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Mark Guydish</p><p>mguydish@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Shredding the competition: Meyers wins regional STEM contest