Luke Taylor, a grade 9 pupil at the German International School in Cape Town, has been named as one of 15 finalists in Google’s Science Fair.
Taylor was a semi-finalist among 60 others named by Google last month. He faced competition from more than 7 500 entrants from more than 90 countries. He stands a chance of winning a US$50 000 scholarship for university and a trip to the Galapagos Islands.
His university of choice is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some of science and technology’s greatest minds have studied.
His entry into the science fair deals with plain-language programming for robotics, which aims to make robots respond to real-life commands like “fetch the newspaper”.
He limited design and testing to a prototype robot called Tribot and used only a basic set of instructions. His application, called Simple, analyses and translates English sentences into C programming code.
Taylor has had no formal training in software development, let alone robotics coding. He will go to Google’s headquarters in California for the final round of judging which will be made up of renowned scientists and innovators. — Staff reporter, TechCentral
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