Wheeling HS video among five national finalists
A group of Wheeling High School students have been named among the five finalists in a national video competition asking students to show how math or science can help their local environment.
“This is great, I'm so proud of the them,” said Wheeling science teacher Lisa Del Muro, who entered the video in Samsung sponsored contest.
Wheeling's video warns students about the dangers of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases by trapping exhaust released from a car's tailpipe and measuring 43 grams of carbon dioxide in only 170 liters of air. Their conclusion? Car exhaust leads to global warming.
The students learned in January their video was among 10 finalists from more than 1,000 entries in the competition. That won their school about $50,000 in computer hardware and software.
This week came the announcement that they had made it into the top five, raising the prize figure to $80,000 in computer merchandise.
Del Muro and two representatives, either students or faculty, are going to an awards ceremony on April 7 in New York, where the grand prize winner will be honored. If the students win the whole thing, they'll pick up a total of $155,000 in prizes.
Online voting accounted for 40 percent of the videos' final scores, with votes from a panel of judges accounting for the other 60 percent. Del Muro said the entire Wheeling student body got behind the project and voted.
“Wheeling students are just awesome,” she said. “They would see me in the hall ‘I voted for ya, Miss D.' It's great because this computer equipment is for everyone.”
The Wheeling students behind the film were seniors Riley Harvey, Jenny Hahn, Adam Rude, Kate Bockey, Jorge Villalobos and Rajarshi Roy.
Wheeling is only finalist from Illinois. The other finalists are Patchogue Medford High School, of Medford, N.Y.; Kokhanok School, of Kokhanok, Alaska; South Shore Charter Public School of Norwell, Mass. and West Salem High School of Salem, Ore.
The winner will be announced in late March. Online voting is over, Del Muro said.
“The winner has already been chosen,” she added. “We just don't know who that is.”