WINNING RESEARCH SCIENTISTS: The Princeton High School student research team has been selected as the New Jersey finalist in the national finals of the 2024 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM Competition. (Photo courtesy of Mark Eastburn)

By Donald Gilpin

A Princeton High School (PHS) team of about 15 student researchers under the direction of PHS science teacher Mark Eastburn has advanced to the finals of the 2024 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM Competition, one of 50 state winners selected from 300 state finalist schools that submitted plans delineating how their project will use STEM to address an important community issue.

The PHS team has been creating interactive robots that can speak various languages of the schools’ student population, including Spanish, Haitian Creole, and the Mayan language Mam. The goal is to help preserve Indigenous languages by using a robotic platform powered by artificial intelligence in the form of a stuffed animal “friend” that will speak Mam.

Eastburn stated that these robots can “encourage continued use of native languages, promote social interaction, and navigate computer-based platforms to enter data and gain skills in digital literacy.” He added, “For much of this work, we are using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, though we have come across significant challenges with Mam because no scaffold exists, and this language has extremely complex grammar.”

There are several Mam speakers on the PHS research team, who come from a small Mam community in Princeton. There are larger Mam communities in Morristown in northern New Jersey,

in Washington, D.C., and in Oakland, Calif.  There are about 500,000 Mam speakers in Guatemala, but, Eastburn pointed out, the numbers are declining.

“We have our students who speak Mam,” said Eastburn, “but they do not have an opportunity to showcase that ability in an academic setting where the language isn’t taught and there’s no real recognition for it. The thought was that we’re getting these students who have amazing skills in linguistics, but how can we acknowledge and recognize and honor that through this project?”

PHS, selected in the fall as one of eight New Jersey schools that received a package of $2,500 in technology and classroom supplies from Samsung, submitted an activity plan in early January. As the New Jersey winner, announced last week, the PHS team has now earned a Samsung technology prize package worth $12,000 and is moving forward in hopes of being named one of three national champions eligible to win $100,000 or more for their schools.

This is the PHS research team’s third entry in the Samsung competition. They won the national grand prize in 2022 and made it to the state finals in 2023.  In preparing for the next round, the student researchers are creating a three-minute video that demonstrates how they are using STEM to address their particular community challenge.

“Working with students involved with Samsung Solve for Tomorrow, we’ve heard time and again that helping people in their local communities and society at-large are key motivators,” said Ann Woo, head of corporate citizenship at Samsung Electronics America, as quoted in a Samsung press release. “That’s certainly borne out by this year’s round of Gen Z-led STEM projects.”

The PHS student researchers divided up into three different groups to tackle three different aspects of the challenging project: robotics, programming/language, and psychology.

“We started in October,” said junior Matias da Costa, a member of the robotics group, in a February 2 phone conversation. “Our idea was to have two or three robots fully functional that we could use at presentations and events to showcase the project. In the meantime we are also making instruction manuals and planning to teach other kids how to build these robots. We are planning to build tutorials, video and oral, as well as an instruction manual we can send to Morristown and Oakland and elsewhere so that people in these communities can build robots in their own communities.”

Thibaut DeVico, also a junior and fellow robotics group member, added, “There are a number of challenges with a project like this. For me the biggest challenge was the design part of the project because we were tasked with having to build something that would fit inside a teddy bear. It was a challenge to design the internal components of the robot, then to fit a computer inside a little stuffed teddy bear.”

The researchers tested out many different designs with different materials, DeVico said, in order to make their prototype as easy to build and as cost-effective as possible.

The students are making progress in understanding the Mam language, said Debdeep Sen, a sophomore and a third robotics squad member, and they are working on making their prototype 10 times cheaper than their earlier models.

Hayah Mian, a junior, explained that her group focused on the psychological issues involved in using the robots for recording. They decided that the robots should be used in schools, since children spend the majority of their time in school, but further challenges involve low digital literacy among students without access to the internet as well as the fact that students from indigenous backgrounds often do not have opportunities to speak their native languages in school.

“It can be very daunting, scary, to use a robot or computer and to speak into it,” she said. “The first thing we have to test is the student’s comfort level in speaking to a robot. Then. we considered how speaking to a robot actually removes the social stress and stigma of speaking that endangered language. We used cortisol levels and blood pressure levels to measure the students’ stress in speaking to the robot.”

Speaking for the language/programming contingent, PHS junior Sofia Son described how her group is overcoming barriers in trying to bridge the gap between people who don’t speak English and those who do, and also to increase accessibility to technology. “We are going to be using ChatGPT for conversations between the person and the robot, but ChatGPT and Google Translate and other online platforms don’t support Mam,” she explained. 

“Those are barriers we had to overcome,” she added, “so we’re currently creating a translator for that, using artificial intelligence and transformer models.” Tutorials, a handbook, and a video will also help the users with that process, she pointed out.

Amy Lin, a junior and another member of the programming/language team, further noted that one other aspect of the project is to enable the stuffed animal robot to speak in Spanish as well as English so that the robot is able to have conversations in both languages.  “We’re focusing on the Spanish aspect,” she said. “We know that a lot of Indigenous people from Guatemala also speak Spanish, and we want to have this robot so that they feel welcomed in the school community.”

Eastburn pointed out that the project goes beyond the typical science experiment into the realms of social justice and human cognition. “Ironically, years of education — time spent in school — can correlate strongly with language loss, because in Guatemala, as in the United States, the dominant language is not an Indigenous language,” he said. “Teachers often don’t speak the Indigenous languages in Guatemala, so everyone just defaults to Spanish. Particularly as one gets up to the high school and college levels, everything is in Spanish in Guatemala and English in the U.S.”

Eastburn noted that many Iindigenous languages are being lost “and by the end of this century we could lose 90 percent of the languages that are spoken, which is tragic.”

He went on to explain that different languages give insights into how brains function and that in losing languages we are losing knowledge that is only available in those languages. “We’ve talked with a linguist at the University of Kansas who told us that the Mam language is very much infused with history, so the oral history of the Mam people will be lost when this language is lost,” said Eastburn.

As the PHS research team works on its video, preparing for the next round of competition, he reflected, “When we started this project, we had no idea how challenging it would be, but I think the challenge is what made the project so appealing.”