An innovative team of high schoolers from Romania is taking home the top prize from the 2021 FIRST Global Challenge’s health category. The competition is an annual Olympics-style robotics competition that aims to get youth around the world interested in STEM by challenging them to design solutions to problems in their communities. 

Under the theme of “Discover & Recover,” teams had to identify a pandemic-related problem in their community in the area of education, environment, health, or economy, and were then tasked with creating a design that solved the problem using STEM. 

For their project, the Romanian team identified five major problems related to the Covid-19 pandemic that need to be solved in their country. According to the team’s website, these included a lack of medical staff in hospitals; a lack of monitoring and tracking of COVID-19 infections; limited access of healthcare among certain groups; the cost of face masks; and the absence of inexpensive equipment for sanitizing masks. The teams had just six weeks to find solutions. 

As Romania Insider reports, the team proposed an affordable, scalable health package with four functional prototypes. These included a dry heat sterilizer used to disinfect protective masks, which cost under $1 USD; an autonomous robot that sterilizes objects and surfaces using UV-C radiation; a mini-station that monitors oxygen levels and ventilation for fire and toxic gas accumulation prevention indoors; and a patient monitoring app.

The students, who were from Traian Lalescu High School în Hunedoara, included Brianna Stan, Denisa Stroia, Alecsandru Costa, Ioana Dîscă, Alexandru Budiul, Maria Alexa, Alexia Neamţu, Ruben Rotariu, Radu Susan and Radu Buboiu. They had help from university students and mentors Răzvan Vîrtan, Cristian Budiul, and Cristina Haranguş. 

Thinking about enrolling in the next First Global Challenge? Check out the competition website for updates.