Focusing on Future: Central Bucks middle schooler named among most promising STEM students in US
BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. (CBS) -- On this week's Focusing on the Future, we're highlighting a middle schooler in Central Bucks County who has been named one of the most promising STEM students in the nation.
He tells CBS3 about his love for quail and how his invention could benefit farmers.
"I like researching how to solve the problems, it's a very nice feeling when it all clicks together," Ethan said.
That's the real magic behind science and engineering.
Ethan Shlossberg, with the help of his dad Eugene, spent hours and hours studying images of quail eggs.
"We made sure to use the same stand in the same position for all the eggs," Eugene said.
Ethan explained why.
"A lot of farmers don't know which quail are laying which egg since they are all kept together in one cage it's hard to find out which ones are doing what," Ethan said.
Ethan and his older sister would spend a lot of time on a friend's family farm that was home to over 200 quail birds.
As part of a science project, Ethan set out to prove and answer the question, "Are quail egg patterns unique to quail?"
They discovered a free public artificial intelligence software program on Amazon.
"The Amazon one we found was really easy to use since it just worked off the cloud, so you don't have to do anything special with your computer," Ethan said. "The engine is geared towards spotting a person in the crowd oh I know this person that's in these other pictures, so we are just doing the same thing with eggs."
It's this forward-thinking that landed Ethan as a top 30 finalist in the Broadcom Masters Premieir STEM Middle School competition.
This year more than 1800 students applied from all over the United States for a chance to win $100,000 in prizes and $25,000 in cash.
Students will present their projects to a group of scientists in Washington, D.C. while also working as a team to solve problems.
"How do they solve a problem how do they deal with the challenge how do they communicate all of this will be put forward to selecting the best young mind scientists and engineers," President and CEO of Society for Science Publisher Maya Ajmera said.
Ethan and his father demonstrated what they did every night at the kitchen table for weeks, there was only one question left.
"Does it work now?" Eugene said.
Ethan filled us in on the results.
"So what I ended up on is looking at the first result it got after each egg and putting that into an excel spreadsheet and checking to see if the percentage was above the percentage it got right if it were just guessing," Ethan said.
Eugene has a background in finance and says because of Ethan's project farmers could soon cash in.
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"Some of the eggs are tastier, bigger if that's the quail that laid them I want more of that kind of quail," Ethan said.