Hi, I am Peter Cullen, voice of OPTIMUS PRIME.
I’m here today at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
with the next generation of engineers.
The winning teams for the 2017
NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge,
otherwise known as NASA OPSPARC.
These young creative minds
took NASA technology and were able to use it to solve
different problems they witnessed out in the world.
Hi, I’m…..Alexa and I'm Ellie
We’re from the Hamlin School in San Francisco, CA.
We took the thermawing material which NASA developed
to de-ice airplanes and used it to create an ingenious
therma-bed for greenhouses so plant lovers and farmers
an keep their plants and crops alive during cold weather.
How did you come up with this idea?
We wanted to help farmers, because they have a really hard way of
of making money.
They can't grow crops during the winter which means they can't
get money during the winter and also they don't know
what the weather is going to be and they need specific conditions
for certain to grow their crops.
So with thermawbed they
can now create those specific conditions and
maintain that environment during the winters
so they can grow crops and make money during the winter too.
We've researched the key components found
in thermawiing. Thermawing consist of a series
of heating pads graphite foil to keep the motors unfrozen.
If the motors were to freeze the plane would be disfunctional.
Having done our research, we designed a
prototype of our greenhouse using the Thermawing technology
and then gathered our materials and tools to bring our idea to life.
And that was it?
Oh no! We had to test and evaluate it.
So from the beginning we had
our heating pads run off of battery
power but then we changed it so now you
just plug the heating pads into
an outlet at the side of your house
so it's easier and you don't have to replace the batteries every year.
When we finalized our designs we made a glog
it's a digital poster.
You too can come up with a cool solution like that.
Join us for next year's
OPSPARC challenge,
where creativity and technology come together
and new ideas are formed.
Be the Spark, Join OPSPARC.