A Hidden High School Senior was selected as a winner of the 2023-2024 ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize for High School Computing for her project on Arctic rivers.
ROANOKE, Va. (WFXR)– A Hidden High School Senior was selected as a winner of the 2023-2024 ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize for High School Computing for her project on Arctic rivers.
The Cutler-Bell Prize recognizes students pursuing computer science and facing challenges head-on outside of the classroom. Eligible students applied for the award by submitting a project or artifact that uses modern technology and computer science. Award winners were selected by a panel of judges based on their project’s ingenuity, complexity, relevancy, and originality.
Hidden Valley’s Franziska Borneff was selected as a winner after submitting her project focusing on monitoring the flow rates of Arctic rivers. The Arctic Rivers are important in the process of detecting climate change, as they directly influence ecosystems and the livelihoods of humans. She became interested in researching these rivers as news articles about climate change aligned with her own research, pushing her to continue studying these trends.
Borneff specifically looked at the relationship between the atmosphere and waterways, finding that air temperature, river discharge, and sea ice concentration were the most significant data points and trends. She collected daily statistics on each factor from publicly available sources for the six major Arctic rivers and plotting points and collecting trend analysis, finding the rivers’ thaw dates were earlier than ever before.
She was able to connect with students from the Yupik Eskimo Village in Alaska to see how the earlier thaw impacted the local community and found this disrupted the ecosystem and created an unknown future for the Yupik people.
Borneff hopes her research will spark studies related to Arctic regions and political attention to the climate issue at hand.
As named winner of the award, she received a $10,000 financial aid that was sent to the university she will be attending in the fall towards tuition and disbursed. Borneff will be formally recognized at the Computer Science Teachers Association’s 2024 Annual Conference in Las Vegas in July.
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