Judge Dr. Brian W. Ogle that is.
The National Science Teachers Association tapped Ogle, an assistant professor of anthrozoology, to serve as a judge in the celebrated Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVision competition.
“Super excited to have been selected as a judge for National Science Teachers Association’s ExploraVision competition,” Ogle said on his Facebook page.
Launched in 1992, the competition for K-12 students has stoked a passion for STEM in nearly 400,000 students from the United States and Canada. ExploraVision dares students to morph into science Nostradamuses. Simulating actual research and development teams, students from current scientific research springboard into the future, collaborating, imagining and describing new technologies that will exist 20 years from now.
And the results have been cutting edge. Previous winning teams dreamed up gadgets such as a hand-held food allergen detector and a device to restore movement to people who have lost limbs.
Judges score online submissions based on each project’s abstract, description, bibliography, five sample web pages.
Judging is structured into a half-dozen regions in the U.S. and Canada. Regional judges are comprised of 50 NSTA district judges and 12 Ph.D. scientists from NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Food and Drug Administration.