Bellevue Teen Gets Award For School Shooting Safety System

BELLEVUE, WA - A Newport High School student has won a national STEM award for designing a system that can be used to locate students in the event of a school shooting - a grim reminder that students are increasingly stepping up where adults aren't.

Gabriella Lui, 14, was recently named a finalist in the 2018 Broadcom MASTERS competition. Lui's invention uses RFID (radio frequency ID) technology to locate individual students. Each student would get a label, and antennas stationed throughout a school would provide real-time location data.

But the technology is much more complex than it sounds.

From the Broadcom description of Liu's invention:

RFID tags use electromagnetic energy at the frequency of radio waves. Antennas pick up the signals and send them on to a reader. Of course, students move around a lot, and school settings vary. Gyms tend to have high ceilings. Classrooms have lower ceilings. School buses have a lot of metal; sometimes that can shield electromagnetic fields.

Gabriella calculated how many antennas each setting needed. She also set up a system to analyze all the data from the tags. She tested how different factors affected the accuracy of readings. Then she tested what happened when students with tags moved around in the classroom and on the bus. The readings produced millions of data points. Gabriella wrote an app to automate analysis of the data. The system worked well to track each student’s arrival and departure times and their location on an ongoing basis.

Lui said she wanted to do something about shootings if adults weren't prepared to.

"[S]chool shootings cannot be prevented without our American politicians’ willingness to tighten gun control," she said.

Liu won $3,500 for her invention, which she'll use to attend a STEM summer camp.

Image courtesy the Society for Science & the Public