EAGLE, Idaho — School may not be in session for most in the Treasure Valley, but some local students are still taking time to practice STEM subjects.
Two middle school students from Eagle just got back from Washington DC where they competed in the national eCybermission Competition.
"When we made it to nationals we were so proud about how far our project had come," said Kashvi Bansal, one of the members of Cloudy with a Chance of Robotics.
She and Rishi Gajera just finished 6th grade at the Treasure Valley Math and Science Center. But their project for eCybermission is totally separate from school, something they made in Kashvi's garage with the help of her dad. It all started with an hour-long training Idaho Food Bank volunteers go through to learn how to sort donations.
"And still some people wouldn't get it," Kashvi said.
Rishi and Kashvi got to work on a prototype to streamline the process. They developed a device that can scan donations and sort them by category — all made possible by this little computer.
"It really does everything and it processes code," Rishi said.
They did six months of research and work to perfect their prototype, ultimately, winning the Idaho and Western Region stages of the eCybermission competition.
"When they called us and told us it was like winning a Nobel prize honestly," said the Cloudy with a Chance of Robotics advisor Raj Bansal.
They didn't win the national competition in DC last week, but their project doesn't end here. The competition awarded them $5,000 to continue their work.
"We want to start by learning more about barcode readers," Kashvi said.
They hope to make an app volunteers can use to make the sorting process even easier.
