Vote Now for NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award

NASA has opened online voting for the agency’s OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award student video contest. The public is invited to vote for its favorite videos, made by students in grades three through eight, developed to help educate America’s youth about the benefits of NASA’s technologies.

NASA is using the correlation between Hasbro’s TRANSFORMERS property and commercialized agency spinoffs to help students understand how technology developed for space and aeronautics transforms into products and technologies used on Earth.

More than 190 children from 31 states have submitted creative videos describing their favorite agency technology from NASA’s “Spinoff 2009” publication. The students also documented why their videos should be selected to win the NASA OPTIMUS PRIME trophy.

Voting closes on Feb. 6, 2011.

To watch the videos and to cast a vote for your favorites, visit http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/optimus/voting.php.

The top five submissions from each of two groups (third through fifth and sixth through eighth grades) will advance for final judging. A panel of NASA judges will select the winners in each of the two grade categories. The winning students, associated spinoff companies and NASA innovators will be announced in February.

NASA intends to make this an annual competition. Students can begin thinking about next year’s competition by deciding which spinoffs they like best from NASA’s recently published “Spinoff 2010.”

For more information about the NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award, visit http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/optimus.

For more information about NASA spinoffs and technology transfer, visit http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/.