Indian American Students Use Ingenuity to Solve Real World Problems

India-West Staff Reporter

LOS ANGELES, CA – Three Indian American students were among the winners of the AT&T and Imagination.org 2021 Inventor’s Challenge. Children, from grades pre-K all the way to high school, from around the world were challenged to create a solution to a problem within their homes, schools, and communities.

Amongst the winners were Samyak Shrimali of Portland, OR. He won the Leonardo Da Vinci Prize in the Grades 9-12 category for “Compost AI’. A highly motivated student at Jesuit High School, Portland, is interested in the fields of Computer Science/IOT. He is involved in numerous extracurricular activities to serve his community and has gained other medals to his credit for scientific research and challenges in many fields.

Safiya Durrani topped the list of Thomas Edison Prize for Grades PreK-2, for her ingenious project “The Tool Band”. The incredible young participant from Rowell, GA discovered “that we could use a way to keep our tools at the ready”

Hasini Meruva of Ashland, MA amazed the judges with her “Water Meter” project and won the Alexander Graham Bell Prize in the Grades 3-5 classification. She presented her project in Mecer County 4-H Fair. It will read how much water one is using in the LCD monitor. One can connect this Water Meter to the shower, sinks, hoses, to know how see the quantity consumes and can plan to save it for future use.

With over 5,500 students participating globally took interest to invent more than 125 potential solutions to problems around their homes, schools, and communities. In its fifth annual year, the Inventor’s Challenge has engaged over 26,000 students from across the globe — providing a rewarding and fun way to foster new skills, exercise creativity, and use critical thinking to solve real issues with only the resources they have at hand.

Each of the individual winners will receive a Samsung tablet, a Bitsbox kit (a learning system that teaches coding), WildCards (robotics hardware and software platform), and AT&T/Imagination.org/Two Bit Circus Foundation swag.

“This year saw an amazing crop of solutions from kids in over 50 cities around the world. Their enthusiastic hard work generated an inspiring array of projects for our judges to choose from,” said Nirvan Mullick, Founder of Imagination.org. “It was difficult to choose the winners from so many impressive entries.”

The contest empowers young inventors to harness their creative potential and address real issues that they face every day — promoting critical 21st century skills and attitudes like innovation, optimism, empathy, and the willingness to experiment and take risks.