A team of students from Concord High School in North Wilmington won first place at a national engineering competition this week.
SourceAmerica Design Challenge asked students from colleges and high schools to come up with innovative solutions to help people with disabilities find work.
Six Concord High seniors partnered with Christiana Care, which runs a special internship for those with disabilities. There, they met an intern whose job was to sort unused medications alphabetically, but had trouble reading the small print on medication labels.
The students responded by creating a barcode reading device called the Scan ‘n Sort, which allows a user to scan in medications and clearly see it on a screen.
Nick Adinolfi from the Concord High team was touched to see how the intern at Christiana Care took to the device.
“The first time he used it, you could see the joy on his face, being able to scan the barcode and see it pop up on the screen and see where to place it," said Adinolfi. "Just being able to see the excitement in that was enough for it to be my favorite part of the entire project.”
The seniors faced off teams from four other high schools from around the country at the final event, which took place in Arlington, Virginia.
For placing first in the high school division, the Concord students won $5,000.
