Freshman Alaina Gassler just won $25,000 at a prestigious national engineering and science competition for her idea.
A 14-year-old student may have just revolutionized the way people drive.
Alaina Gassler, a freshman at Avon Grove Charter School in West Grove, Pennsylvania, just won a $25,000 prize for potentially eliminating the blind spots on a car.
It all started with their family’s SUV. She told Inside Edition that her mom never liked to drive the car because its A-pillars caused blind spots.
“It had the common one when you are trying to change lanes and you have to look back over your shoulder to make sure things are OK,” mom Meagan Gassler said. “It also had this huge passenger side blind spot that made me really nervous pulling up to intersections, worried that I might hit bikers”
Alaina added, “These blind spots, even though they don’t look very big, they can block out entire cars.”
Her idea, for which she won the Samueli Foundation Prize at the science and engineering competition, Broadcom MASTERS, eliminated the problem by mounting a webcam to the outside of the car that would capture live video of the blind spots.
The video would then be broadcast to a projector mounted above the driver’s head.
“It's mounted onto the sunroof we have … and it projected the image onto the blind spot,” Alaina said. “It’s so exciting that it worked."
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