For the tenth year we gave out the Butwin Elias Science and Technology Award! We received 5 projects and awarded $2,450. The winners of this years award are below:

First Place ($1,500): Making an 8-Bit Computer

The first place winner of the 2021-2022 BEST award was Will Block with his 8-Bit computer build. The instructable that details his winning project can be found here.  

Second Place ($600): Pong Using Visual C#

Michael Andrews won second place with his Pong game implemented in Visual C#. The instructable that he wrote to document his project can be found here. 

Third Place ($150): Spider-Man Grappler

Bobby Macko won third place with his Spider-Man Grappler build. The instructable that he wrote documenting his video game can be found here. 

Fourth Place ($100): Automated Chessboard

Cristian Duran and Shane Cesare won fourth place with their instructable that documented how to build an automated chessboard. The instructable they wrote can be found here. 

Fifth Place ($50): 3D Printed Project

Max Gregor won 5th place with a 3D printed project. This project ended up being too dangerous to publish on instructables so no URL is provided.

Speech Given At the Awards Ceremony: 

This was the first year that the Awards were presented at the new combined WBASD and Adam Iseman gave this speech before giving out the awards:

Hello! I’m Adam Iseman and I’m an alumnus of E. L. Meyers High School class of 2007. After Meyers I went on to get an undergraduate degree at Columbia University and a master’s degree from the University of Washington both in Electrical Engineering. Even after attending these prestigious institutions I come back to Wilkes-Barre each year to help present two awards in honor of some of the best teachers I’ve ever had. Ten years ago, we started the Butwin Elias Science and Technology Award to honor Mr. George Butwin and amazing physics teacher who retired in 2005 and Mr. Samuel Elias who is still currently inspiring students on a daily basis. Six years ago, we started the Caffrey Welles Fine Arts Award to honor Mrs. Mollie Caffrey and Mr. Kevin Welles two more awesome teachers that are still inspiring students every day. I still use the structures and methods of thought I learned from these teachers on a daily basis and I can’t imagine where I’d be in life if I didn’t have them as influences. Let’s take a moment to give a round of applause for all of the awesome teachers that we currently have here!

So the awards I’m here to present today are structured as contests where students submit either a science and technology project or an artistic project and then a panel of alumni judges vote on their favorites and whichever project gets the most votes gets higher cash prizes for placing 5th through 1st. We have received some really amazing projects over the years and I’m quite excited to see what projects we will get with even more students now that we have consolidated schools.

For all of the students that are currently here I just want to run a quick semi-scientific experiment to disprove a myth that I think is actually pretty terribly wrong and harmful. Who here hasn’t heard the phrase that our high school years are the best years of our lives? It is a trope in a bunch of different movie and TV shows and anything that tells you this is basically just lying. So, the experiment I’d like to quickly run involves all of the high school alumni in the room. Can everyone that has graduated high school at least like five years ago please raise their hands! Ok we’ve got a decent number of high school graduates here! Please keep your hands up for a bit! With your hands up I’d like you to think of your happiest memory. This could be marrying a spouse, having a child or anything that brings you lots of happiness when you think of it. Everyone have a good happy memory in mind? Ok so if your happiest memory was during high school keep your hand raised. If it was during any other time of your life lower your hand. Notice the lack of hands currently up…

Ok so we have just quickly sort of proved that high school is not the best years of your life. I like to think of high school as being the start of the journey of the rest of your life. I started messing around with robotics when I was in high school. Mr. Elias even helped me work through how to wire up the controls of one of my first science Olympiad robots and now I’m currently working on launching a robotics startup! Whatever it is that you are interested in this is just the start of your journey in it. The student that turns in a couple of different paintings for an art’s award might go on to revolutionize the art world. The student who is just starting to experiment with wiring together circuits might help make a green energy breakthrough. I’m extremely excited to see all of the awesome things that you guys go on to do on your journeys in the arts and sciences!

Now let’s get on to actually presenting these awards…