Central Highschool is a state finalist at the Samsung Solve For Tomorrow contest

"We are a state finalist to hopefully get funding for our project," said Alene Vandermyde.

Meet Alene Vandermyde, a technology innovator teacher at Central High School in Davenport.

"The kids can kind of choose their way of how they want to interact with STEM here, which will be kind of, using their science and technology knowledge to do some kind of engineering thing," said Vandermyde.
Her students working on a project that made it to the state finals for the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest.

"Sarah has a sister who is profoundly disabled, watched her sister go through different devices, different ways to interact with computers, something that Sarah loves, she wanted to come up with a better way for anybody who has any kind of disability to interact with a computer."
As a class, they came up with this device.

"This is a raspberry-pi which is like a mini-computer, this is an accelerometer right now it's one of the sensor types we care currently testing, we also have a muscle-sensor here, another sensor type we are currently testing."

A device that will plug into any computer and allow any person with disabilities to be able to interact with the computer.

"One of the biggest issues is that we basically have 2 ways to interact with the machine, you can use a mouse or a touch screen and both of those ways require a lot of movement and you if you don't have the ability to move, as much, then you can't be a part of the online world."

Just an idea, that has been brought to life and on the road to possibly impact lives.

"Teachers will come up to me and say wow you're doing great and amazing things, but it's not me that's doing them, I can do great things because I got the kids that can do great, amazing things."