Three North Oldham High School (NOHS) students are taking a shot at helping people with disabilities.

Cole Gerdemann, Allyssa England and Adam Robinette are in the process of building a system that will help people with visual disabilities play basketball.

“It’s something that you haven’t seen anybody else do,” Gerdemann said. “You’ve seen activities for blind people being created, but you haven’t seen many sports for blind people. Shooting balls when you’re blind, it’s something that doesn’t really exist.”

The three students were part of an engineering class that had taken on the project, but gradually other members of the class began drifting to other projects. But Gerdemann, England and Robinette remained, not only continuing the project, but expanding its scope.

“Originally when it started out, we were only trying to figure out where the basketball hit on the backboard, but then we started working more on figuring out where the player is too,” Gerdemann said.

Currently, the concept includes sensors that will connect to a speaker and tell the player where the basketball hit the backboard and a laser-guided ball return system that tracks where players are on the court and returns the ball to them after they take a shot.

Beyond the charitable side of the project, England said the group took on the project because it tested and expanded their knowledge of almost every aspect of engineering.

“It includes the coding, like we did for sensing where the ball hit the backboard, and then electrical, we’re wiring up sensors. Then mechanical. We’re physically building the structures to hold the backboard and the motor for returning the ball,” she said.

Gerdemann said the project allowed him to build an entirely new skill almost from scratch.

“There was a lot of programming involved in this and I went into this not knowing much about programming,” he said. “I’m coming out of this feeling fairly competent.”

The three designed the system to be as simple as possible for anyone who wants to use it.

“It would be a simple matter of turning it on, and then it’s ready,” Gerdemann said. “That’s all. It’ll tell you where the player is. The only possible action you’d have to do is line up the returner that’s in the middle when you first turn it on.”

The system even takes considerations for those with limited vision. The students painted their backboard with bright, high contrast colors so that players with limited vision can still see to shoot.

Though it is simple for a player to use, Gerdemann, England and Robinette found creating the system to be anything but easy.

The students ran into several obstacles while preparing to build, code and wire their setup. They considered using radio waves to track players, but for games where someone could be standing in the same place for a long time, the waves moved too quickly. Camera technology was too complicated and untested. Finally, the students unearthed an idea considered for the original project and decided to use a grid of lasers.

The shot tracking system met its own challenges. Sensors underneath the backboard gave inaccurate readings when they did not simply break. Finally, they mounted the sensors on arms extending from the basket.

Each student had to learn new skills and take existing abilities to the limits. The project is not completely finished, but upon test after test, the students are confident in the progress they have made. “We’ve tested the grid system,” Gerdemann said. “That system does work and we know it’ll work on a larger scale too. We haven’t fully tested the system for figuring out where the basketball hits, but we’ve tested the sensors individually and we’re confident that’ll work too. It’s more assembling together the final product at this point than developing anything further.” And for Gerdemann, that sense that he has solved a problem is one of the best parts of engineering.

“It’s the reward,” he said. “It’s the satisfaction of knowing you found a problem and now you’ve conquered the problem and now it’s solved and it works. That is the best thing ever.”