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Students from Oliver Street School, pictured here in Austin during the SXSWedu conference, won a national STEM contest.

(Handout)

NEWARK — Oliver Street Elementary School was one of five schools nationwide to win the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest, a competition that asks students to apply STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) solutions to fix problems in their communities.

Oliver Street students won $140,000 for "Guarding the Water Supply," a project they researched and designed to clean up the polluted Passaic River by designing a system of sewer grates to reduce the amount of street garbage flowing into the river.

“Oliver Street School’s outstanding response to Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow contest reflects the hard work, ingenuity and creative thought that STEM education is all about,” Assistant Superintendent Mitchell Center said. “When challenged to relate their classroom learning and knowledge of 21st century technology directly to their own neighborhood, these bright and engaged students saw a grassroots opportunity to step up as environmental stewards of the Passaic River."

Oliver and the other four winning schools — from Miami, Philadelphia, Yakima, Wash., and Sunburst, Mont., — were chosen from 2,300 schools around the nation.

Oliver Street STEM students presented their prototype at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas earlier this month. They were selected as one of five winners through a national crowd-sourcing campaign.

The students have been working on the project since the fall. They will choose prizes from Samsung products, including printers, touchscreen displays and other monitors. The students will be honored next month at a luncheon in Washington, D.C. with lawmakers.

The students explain their Guarding the Water Supply project in this video.

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