Local teams come home winners from STLP championship

Yahoo

28-04-2025

ASHLAND Several area schools scored big at the Student Technology Leadership Program (STLP) State Championship in Lexington last weekend.
It's the largest event Rupp Arena hosts, with 25,000 attending, according to Cara Ryver, sixth-grade language arts teacher at Boyd County Middle School and STLP coach, whose student Peyton Moore won first place in a creative digital arts category called Kentucky Travel.
'Entrants were tasked with choosing any town in Kentucky and finding something about the town to focus on,' Ryver said. 'The theme was Bluegrass Bites and students were to find a restaurant and review it.'
She said Moore's video focused on The Mill AKY in Ashland.
'This is typically a team project, but he did it all by himself, from beginning to end,' she said.
Moore, a seventh-grader, is the son of Greg Moore and Heather Moore-Frame.
'It was notable how well eastern Kentucky was represented, between Greenup and Boyd counties,' Ryver said.
One of the two teams from Russell High School won Best Technical Project in the state, encompassing all grades.
Coach Carolyn McGranahan, who also teaches AP U.S. history, world history and fine arts, said the winning team created Project Lockdown, a small computer unit that collects visual information to help first responders to school shootings see where problems exist. Using their technical skills and information they collected from the school resource officer, e911 experts, teachers and IT people, they developed an inexpensive information processor that aims to help save lives, especially in school districts that can't afford more expensive systems.
McGranahan said for the students, the project was personal.
'We're living in an age where lockdowns, unfortunately, have become a normal thing,' she said. 'Kentucky was the first state in the United States to have a school shooting and it was close to us.'
She said they chose a project that would make a difference and would be affordable to all schools.
'It's outstanding,' she said. 'It's truly remarkable what they've accomplished.'
Summit Elementary's team won first place in its category, as it did two years prior. The coach is Letitia Rudie.
Russell Middle School entered robotics categories using Legos, coach Luke McCallister, seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher, said. The school's three teams were winners.
In the RCX Extreme Competition, two teams entered and placed first and second. McCallister said students designed, built and programmed a Lego robot with attachments aimed at completing various tasks required by the competition.
A team competing in Robot Royale Line Follower not only won first, but set a state record for speed.
The goal was to create a robot to follow a line; the winner was the team with the fastest robot. Russell's team broke the 12-second record with a time of 11.8 seconds. The distance traveled was about 20 feet, McCallister said.
Ashland Middle School took second place with its custom-built helmet sensor system which aims to detect potentially concussion-level impacts.
Sensors fit inside a helmet and send data to a student-developed app when a collision exceeds a force threshold, coach Mark Harmon said. The app stores the data and notifies coaches so players can be assessed for possible head injuries.
The team consists of student-athletes, of whom so many have experienced concussions.
'Their goal wasn't to prevent all head injuries — something they acknowledge isn't realistic — but to raise awareness and create a tool to support coaches and teammates in responding more quickly and safely,' Harmon said.
'I couldn't be more proud of these students, not just for the award they earned, but for the heart, effort and real-world thinking they brought to this project,' Harmon said. 'They saw a problem that affected them personally and turned it into an opportunity to help others. That's what true innovation looks like.'