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Germantown Eighth-Grader Wins NASA Contest

Dahlia Senthilnathan Huh's YouTube video won NASA's Optimus Prime Spinoff competition.

High-tech tracking of whisker spots, algorithms and NASA science led to a happily ever after in a Roberto Clemente Middle School student’s video story about a mother polar bear’s search for her missing cub.

In this case, it earned eighth-grader Dahlia Senthilnathan Huh a win in NASA’s Optimus Prime Spinoff competition.

Dahlia created a winning video based on a story in NASA's Spinoff 2009 publication. The article, "Star-Mapping Tools Enable Tracking of Endangered Animals," was about how a star-mapping algorithm used to analyze Hubble Space Telescope imagery is helping scientists track endangered animals, according to NASA’s April 27 press release announcing the winner.

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For the contest, NASA and Hasboro – the company behind the Transformers brand – used Transformers leader Optimus Prime as a creative prompt: Create videos exploring how NASA technology “transforms” into things used daily. The videos were posted on YouTube, where people voted for their favorites. A panel of NASA judges reviewed the top five videos in each age category and selected two winners, according to the release.

“I wanted it to be more than (an) informational public service announcement,” Dahlia told Patch. “I did not want it to feel like facts all over the place. I wanted to make it interesting so you want to watch it until the end.”

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Patch caught up with Dahlia at school, following her trip to a special awards ceremony in Colorado on April 12, where she received the NASA Optimus Prime trophy. Dahlia got to meet her role models – people who’ve been to outer space. She said got to sit at the same lunch table as astronaut Barbara Morgan. They talked about everything – school, pets, siblings and space travel, of course. 

“It was nice to meet such a successful person and then find out that they are so regular in a way,” Dahlia said.

Based on her mother Yun Huh’s estimates, Dahlia sat behind a computer for 14 hours to create a four-minute YouTube video during winter break. Huh said that at one point, she was concerned that her daughter was getting distracted.

“I kept asking when she was going to make the video and she said she was thinking, thinking, thinking,” Huh said.

Dahlia finally got down to business.

She submitted her entry and went back to school. She checked the NASA website every day to see if she had won. Then one day she saw her name. She had been nominated as one of the five finalists and she had to get as many people as she could to vote for her video.

And then she was named a winner. The video has received more than 2,200 views so far. Roberto Clemente Principal Khadija Barkley said she was impressed.

“I was like 'Oh my goodness, that is good',” Barkley said. “It is so cute and so wonderful and more importantly it is scientific … it is a real application of how science comes alive in the world.”

Dahlia said that her motivation to enter the contest was her ongoing fascination with science. 

“I like it because there is so much you can do,” Dahlia said. “There is a feeling that you can invent something or come up with an idea that someone has not thought of yet. It’s not like where you do a worksheet.”

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