2009 Research and Design Website Challenge
Imagine an everyday simple task like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes, tasks which most of us take for granted. However for millions of people who have suffered limb loss this is not the case.
There are approximately 1.7 million people living with limb loss in the US alone and world wide, the estimate is 10 million [1]. Limb loss can be attributed to congenital defects, disease, and sadly, to accidents and violence. Prostheses are artificial parts made to replace or augment missing body parts. A bionic, biomechatronic [2], “robotic” prosthesis would greatly improve the quality of life for millions of people worldwide.
Researchers have developed “Neural Prosthesis” in animal models [3] and this research indicates promise for a future thought controlled human prosthesis. Touch BionicsTM has developed the world’s first bionic hand, the i-LIMBTM Hand [4].
According to the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute, over one million Americans aged 40 and over are currently blind and an additional 2.4 million are visually impaired [5]. A California company, Second Sight, is investigating implantable visual prosthetics to enable blind individuals to achieve greater independence [6].
Approximately 15 percent (32.5 million) of American adults report some degree of hearing loss and 2 to 3 out of every 1,000 children in the United States are born deaf or hard-of-hearing [7]. Current technologies for assistive devices include digital hearing aids and cochlear implants which generally have the battery and processor worn outside the ear. Future research is being conducted to design completely implantable assistive devices with greater sensitivity. These and other future advances, which utilize robotic and bionic technology, will improve the quality of life for a significant number of people worldwide.
Your Challenge
This year’s R&D Website Challenge is to create a website where you:
- Select and focus on a specific area of interest such as: eye, inner ear, hand, upper arm, lower leg, foot.
- Describe the current state of bionic, robotics prostheses (artificial part made to replace or augment a missing part) use in your specific area of interest.
- Tell us about the future direction and goals of the technology.
- What advances will have to be made to reach these goals?
- Give us your ideas and designs for creating a bionic prosthesis for your specific area of interest.
Some Questions to Consider
- Can bionic appendages be designed to be as fully functional as a real appendage?
- Can these appendages be designed to take up no more space than a normal appendage?
- Can the human brain control these appendages?
- Can bionic eyes (cameras), be developed that restore normal vision?
- Can bionic implants be developed that restore normal hearing?
- Can these prostheses be designed and produced economically enough so that they are accessible to everyone who needs them?
Judging:
Websites will be judged by a committee of experts in engineering and robotics. Judging will be as follows:
- 15% for the website presentation.
- 10% for bibliography (proper citations, appropriate listing of sources). Full credit will require at least 5 sources.
- 25% for your description of the current state of the art in your selected area.
- 25% for your description of the future direction and goals of the technology.
- 25% for your bionic prosthesis ideas and designs.
Changes from Previous Years
We’ve made several significant changes to this year’s Research and Design Website Challenge. First, we are no longer requiring that your entries be hosted at teams.kipr.org. Contest entries can be located at any publicly accessible url, just make sure that our judges will be able to access your site from the Internet. (Hosting your website with us is still an option, however. Contact support@kipr.org for more information.)
Second, you are no longer required to register for Botball to participate in the Challenge. Any middle school, high school, home school group, or community organization may enter one team of middle and/or high school students in this contest. One additional entry is allowed for each registered Botball team.
Third, you will use the Botball Team Home Base to submit your entry and additional supporting information.
Finally, the contest dates have all moved up. We’ve released the contest earlier and the deadlines for submission are earlier as well. See the Important Deadlines! section for details.
How to Enter
To enter the contest as a registered Botball team, you should log in to the Team Home Base with your team code and find the 2009 Research and Design Website Challenge area. This is where you will submit the url for your website and complete all other requirements for your submission.
The Home Base is online at http://homebase.kipr.org
To enter the contest without registering for Botball, you will have to register as a Research and Design Contest team to get a team code and password so that you can log in to the Team Home Base. There is no charge associated with registering as a Research and Design Contest team.
To register for just the R&D contest, click here. NOTE: you only need to do this if you wish to have a contest entry that is not associated with a Botball team.
Important Deadlines!
There are two important deadlines to be aware of this season.
Opt-in and Initial Submission Deadline — Nov 18
The initial deadline is scheduled for Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 11:55 pm CST. On or before this date, your team should log in to the Team Home Base and complete the Opt-in and Initial Submission activities.
Final Deadline — Dec. 2
After you have met the initial deadline, your team will have until Tuesday, December 2, 2008 11:55 pm CST to complete your entry. On or before this date, your team should finish development of your website and complete the Final Deadline activities in the Team Home Base.
Awards
This is a national competition divided into middle school and high school divisions. Winners will be announced on the Botball website before the first regional tournament. The winners will be given their awards at their regional tournament award ceremony and will also be acknowledged at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics.
First, second, and third place trophies will be awarded along with a number of honorable mention awards.
The first place team in each division will be given a $1,000 award that can be used as a travel grant to the Global Conference on Educational Robotics to be held in summer of 2009 or as a partial fee waiver towards their 2010 Botball team registration. The second place prize in each division will be a $500 award and the third place prize in each division will be a $250 award. All of these awards can be used either as a travel grant to attend the Global Conference or as a partial fee waiver for their 2010 Botball team registration.
Research and Design Website winners will be automatically accepted to present a paper based on their winning research at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics. These papers will be included in our Global Conference Proceedings.
General Guidelines:
- Any middle school, high school, home school group, or community organization may enter a team of middle and/or high school students in this contest. If you have questions about your groups eligibility, please email support@kipr.org, or call us at 405 579 4609.
- Organizations with a registered Botball team may submit one additional entry per registered team.
- Participation in the R & D Website Challenge is voluntary, and will not affect a team’s standing in any other portion of the Botball program.
- Entries must be publicly available for our judges to review at the time of the entry deadline.
- As part of your entry, you will submit a zip archive containing all of the files for your site through the Team Home Base. This archive should contain an exact copy of your website in its final version. Submitted archives will be examined by the judges in the event of deadline disputes.
- Winning entries will be archived at the KISS Institute website. By entering the contest, you are giving KISS Institute permission to host this copy of your website.
Organizational and Technical Guidelines:
- You must have an index page that contains a clearly labeled Table of Contents that links to each section of your site, including your bibliography. The table of contents may be implemented any way the team desires, but its ease of use will affect your team’s score. Pages that are not directly linked from the table of contents may not be found by the judges.
- Your index page must display your team code in a clearly visible location. We recommend including it in the header or masthead of this page.
- When printed, the entire website (except for bibliography) should print within 10 pages (including all pictures and space for movie displays, etc). Judges will be instructed to judge only that far into the website, considering additional content as supplementary “appendix” material. Your bibliography does not count towards the 10 page limit.
- Your report can include graphics (flash, jpg, or gif files), small videos (flash, Quicktime or mpg), and audio (flash or mp3).
- Bear in mind that our judges may be accessing your site using a variety of different kinds of network connections, including dialup. In the past, some judges have had trouble with sites that included large multimedia files.
- Content that requires browser plug-ins (like Flash ) is allowed, if those plug-ins are available for both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
- Any plug-ins required to view your site must be listed on your index page, along with information on downloading those plug-ins. No plug-ins, except for Flash, should be needed to view the index page.
- Judges will use a variety of computers and browsers - do not use anything in your web page that can only be viewed using a specific operating system or browser.
- At minimum, your website must be viewable using Internet Explorer 6, and either Safari 2.0 or Firefox 2.0
- If you are unsure whether or not your page is compatible, email support@kipr.org with a subject line: “R & D Contest Test” and let us know:
- Your team number
- What operating system and internet browsers you have already checked
- What specifically you want us to check. (e.g., does this link work? or can you see that figure? or do you hear the theme to Rocky when the page comes up?).
- One way to help make sure that your site will work correctly with most web browsers is to check that you have correctly followed the relevant web standards.
Website Bibliography Guidelines
Your entry’s bibliography should follow the following guidelines:
- Your website must contain original content created only by the students on the website team. (For Botball teams, these need not be the same students who build and program the robots.)
- You must properly acknowledge the creators of work on which your website material is based.
- Material copied from other sources must be properly quoted and immediately followed with a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material at the conclusion of the quote.
- Material that is substantially drawn from a single source (i.e., paraphrased) should be followed by a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material.
- Sources used to supply facts or ideas that are used in your content should be acknowledged through a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source material.
- Graphics, videos and pictures not created by the website team should be immediately followed by a hyperlink, or bibliographic reference to the source of the material.
- All sources used in the creation of your website (including those already referenced in the text) should be included in a bibliography page on your website.
- The motivation section of these rules with the bibliography is an example of a correct way to do bibliographic citation.
- A link to your bibliography must appear on your website index.
- The bibliography does not count against the judging page limit (do not skimp on the bibliography).
- Wikipedia is a valuable resource for researchers, but it is not a primary source. You may use Wikipedia to start your research, but look at the Wikipedia article’s bibliography and read through the original source. Once you have done that, cite the original source. If a Wikipedia article does not have a bibliography, then you can use it as a primary source, but keep in mind that anyone can write a Wikipedia article, and without original sources to check, you should question the article’s accuracy (we will!).
- Any website not containing a bibliography or containing non-original material that is not properly attributed, will be disqualified from the contest.
- Please keep in mind that when it comes to judging your websites, 200 bibliographic sources are not necessarily better then 50 sources. However, 5 bibliographic sources are better then 1.
Bibliography
- National Limb Loss Information Center. <http://www.amputee-coalition.org/nllic_about.html >
- Biomechatronic group MIT. < http://biomech.media.mit.edu/index.html >
- Science Daily. < http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223135857.htm >
- Touch Bionics < www.touchbionics.com >
- National Eye Institute < http://www.nei.nih.gov/ >
- Second Sight. <http://www.2-sight.com/>
- National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders < http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick.htm >