Vernooy’s award-winning project focused on creating more representative electoral districts and flagging unfair gerrymandering practices.
The Broadcom MASTERS middle school STEM competition took on a very different format this year. Normally a three-day, in-person event in Washington, D.C., this year’s competition corralled the 30 middle school finalists via video calls and Slack messages.
“It was a grand experiment,” said Paula Golden, President of the Broadcom Foundation. “These kids had been in isolation for six months, and suddenly they were called upon to exhibit their creativity and collaboration skills in a Zoom format over three days.”
A collaboration between the Broadcom Foundation and Society for Science & the Public, the Broadcom MASTERS competition tests young scientists’ mastery of five 21st century skills: critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, and confidence. Finalists, representing 29 schools across 16 states in the U.S., were chosen based on winning projects from local and regional science fairs. At the end of the competition, over $100,000 was awarded in prizes.
Kai Vernooy, a 14-year-old middle school student from Niskayuna, NY, won the Marconi-Samueli Award in recognition of his timely project, which used a newly developed algorithm to identify unfair congressional districts and develop more representative ones.
“I became interested in voting districts when I learned about the threats that gerrymandering poses in how we elect our representatives,” Vernooy said. “It encourages extreme candidates and splits apart communities. I was surprised by the lack of good solutions, so I brought the problem to my team and we started thinking about how to solve it.”
The Marconi-Samueli Award comes from a gift made by Henry Samueli, the 2012 Marconi Fellow and co-founder of Broadcom, whose work in the development and commercialization of analog and mixed signal circuits led to the explosive growth of the consumer broadband industry. Samueli donated his Marconi Prize money to endow the Marconi-Samueli Award, which recognizes young scientists who demonstrate Guglielmo Marconi’s spirit of innovation.
“Kai’s project shows that he is aware of his world in a way that is not defined by its limitations,” said Golden. “The fact that Kai took a social phenomenon that plagues our society, understood the principles of it, and figured out a way to use his computing knowledge to develop a solution that may be able to be applied in public policy is a very exciting breakthrough. His generation is defining a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving.”
In addition to addressing an incredibly relevant issue, Vernooy’s project has a digital inclusion angle.
“To me, inclusion means that anyone can access not only the Internet, but software as well,” he said. “For this reason, we made our project Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), because we want everyone to be able to inspect and run our code. Many existing methods for combating gerrymandering are inaccessible to citizens. I believe that open-source projects need to be protected and advocated for.”
