Congratulations to RKYHS senior Maurice Korish who has been awarded the prestigious Cutler-Bell Prize for Excellence in High School Computing from the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Korish is one of four winners out of thousands of entrants around the country. He will receive a $10,000 award to be used for higher education and career advancement in computer science. His winning project, FeedBot, originated in the RKYHS lab as his 10th grade scientific engineering project. It is a robotic feeding arm for a person who is not able to physically feed themselves. For this project, Korish built facial recognition software to track an individual’s head movement so that the arm can follow the person’s mouth and then bring the spoon directly to it. Korish had previously been awarded first place at the CIJE annual Innovation Day Conference in New York City for the FeedBot in the Innovation in Health Care category.

Korish has been an active participant in the RKYHS computer science and RKYHS engineering tracks in all four years of his RKYHS education. The RKYHS computer science program now includes an expanded full four year sequence of courses with the addition of Advanced Topics in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Quantitative Computer Science and Data Modeling, along with AP Computer Science A and Introduction to Computer Science, and the Scientific Research Training Institute/Independent Research in Computer Science.