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Two Local Robotics Students Recognized in People Magazine for Their Humanitarian Work

Posted on October 15, 2023 by J Bradshaw.

Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) students Daniela Moreno and Yariselle Andujar with some of the early prototypes for “Hands Across Boarders,” a student-led, global community service project that the pair started to help child amputees both here and abroad. – Image credit: Ken Blaze.

Best friends Daniela Moreno, age 15, and Yariselle Andujar, age 17, from Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School were recently featured in People Magazine for their student-led initiative to design, engineer, and manufacture 3D printed prosthetics hands and arms for children in developing countries. The pair, who are participants in the Great Lakes Science Center's Robotics Initiative, were among the eight young ladies highlighted on PEOPLE's 2023 List of "Girls Changing the World," a special human interest article celebrating the International Day of the Girl. Click HERE to read the article online.

The project, which the girls call “Hands Across Borders,” began after the pair learned about a 12-year-old girl named Samantha living in Ecuador. Samantha had been in a serious bus crash that severed her left arm just beneath the shoulder and resulted in significant nerve and muscle damage to the right arm leaving it unresponsive, with no feeling below the shoulder. After hearing about Samantha's story, the pair just knew they had to help.

Daniela, who serves as one of the Mechanical Leads on her robotics team, is a recent immigrant from Ecuador and had recently learned to use 3D printers to manufacture some of the parts for the team’s competition robot. Now she saw an opportunity to use the skills that she had developed building robots for an even greater purpose. With the help of Yariselle, who serves as the team’s captain, the two set off the convince their teammates to take on the challenge of engineering a low-cost solution for Samantha.

What began out of a desire to help a young girl in Ecuador has quickly grown into a global community service project, with high school robotics students from six CMSD teams graciously donating their time and talents to support the project. And with most of the students having grown up in impoverished neighborhoods, these kids know what it’s like to be poor. And they all agree, that if a family truly needed one of their 3D-printed devices, they would provide it for that family, free of charge. With Yariselle’s leadership and Daniela’s passion for the project, the girls are using their newly developed entrepreneurship skills to raise money for the supplies, and their fellow students are donating their labor. With the help of their adult mentors, the financial support of the Great Lakes Science Center and others, and the guidance of the doctors and nurses with IMAHelps.org, a US-based volunteer organization that runs humanitarian medical missions to countries in Asia, the Caribbean, and in Central and South America, sponsors, the students are making a tremendous impact.

Samantha (front) tries on the latest iteration of a prosthetic arm as Yariselle makes minor adjustments. The arm was custom-made for Samantha by CMSD robotics students in Cleveland, OH, and hand-delivered by Yariselle during a recent mission trip to Ecuador - Image credit: Great Lakes Science Center

By the way, Samantha received one of the first 3D-printed prosthetic devices that the robotics students created last fall. The doctors with IMAHelps were so impressed with the quality of the team's work that they have contracted with students to continue making upper limb prosthetics devices for their other child patients at mission sites worldwide.

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