Concord High seniors win national engineering competition

Six students from Concord High School won SourceAmerica’s Design Challenge for high school students that sought innovations for disabled people in the workplace.
Nick Adinolfi, Sophia Friedeborn, Devlan Horner, Carson Hughes, Taylor Nguyen and Michael Slemko worked as team Concord Alpha Red One to develop a barcode scanning system for sorting medicines at Christiana Care, according to a story from Delaware Public Media. They worked with Justin Hall, an intern at Christiana Care who has autism. His job is to sort labeled bags of unused medications alphabetically, but he’s had trouble doing it because the print on the labels was small and hard to read.

The Concord seniors devised Scan ‘N Sort, which involves a barcode scanner and screen that shows the name of the drug and where to sort it. They also added speakers for visually impaired people. After figuring out the coding needed for scanning, the students used trigonometry to determine the best angle to mount the scanner and a 3D printer to create the wedge for the scanner mount.
The six competed against four other teams in Arlington, Va., and as the big winners, went home with $5,000.
Adinolfi said the biggest thrill was watching Hall use the system for the first time. “Just being able to see the excitement in that was enough for it to be my favorite part of the entire project,” he told Delaware Public Media.