Ridgefield Park, NJ—Samsung announced the 51 state winners in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Contest, the company’s commitment to raise interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) learning across America. Each winner will receive Samsung products and Adobe software to compete in the next phase of the competition, as well as a total of at least $20,000 in technology.
“We congratulate these winners,” said David Steel, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics North America. “The creativity and quality of these projects has raised the level of this competition to new heights. We are very encouraged by what we’ve seen from these participants. Not only are we excited to see these projects come to life but also how these young people will use STEM after this contest to improve their own futures as well as the wider world.”
The 51 state winners, listed at samsung.com/us/news/22227, were chosen from more than 2,300 applicants. Their ideas ran the gamut from reducing pollution with bicycles made from bamboo to finding the safest routes to school in an urban community to compelling government action to remove carcinogens in the community.
Samsung created Solve for Tomorrow in 2010 to get students and teachers excited about STEM by challenging them to apply their classroom learning to solve a real-world issue in their local community. This year, Solve for Tomorrow has doubled the value of the prize packages from last year.
In the next stage of the competition, the state winners will submit a short video documenting their project, from which 15 national finalists will be chosen. From those 15, five national winners will be selected—three by a panel of judges, one by Samsung employees and one by public online voting that will take place from February 14 to March 13, 2014.
The 15 national finalists will each receive a technology package valued at $35,000; the five national winners will each garner one valued at $140,000 and will be honored in April 2014 at an awards ceremony in Washington, DC.
Since 2004, Samsung’s education programs have contributed more than $13 million in technology to more than 500 public schools in the United States. Samsung continues to support children’s education by providing tools that empower young people to learn through a variety of STEM initiatives, including the company’s Summer Science Camps, Mobile Application Academies and a partnership with the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF).
For a complete listing of the winning schools, log on to samsung.com/us/news/22227.
