A HELMET TO CHANGE THE GAME

You are going to read an article about a young inventor. For questions 1 - 6, choose the answer (A, B, C, D) which you think fits best according to the text.

High school football players don’t have it easy. A report from 2013 states that they’re twice as likely to sustain a concussion as college players, and often these injuries go unreported. High school football players are in greater danger mostly because they would rather play through a game even when they are injured.

Berto Garcia got a concussion during his high school footballs years, and was told he couldn’t play anymore. As an electronics-savvy individual, Garcia decided he wanted to come up with a solution.

 “I was 15 when I started this project—I knew what materials I needed, but didn’t know how to build it or code it,” Garcia says. He began studying animals that experience daily hits to the head without suffering damage, such as rams and woodpeckers. He found that these animals have stabilizer muscles in their necks that help reduce injuries. Humans, unfortunately, aren’t built with these stabilizer muscles.

Garcia bought an Arduino microcontroller and taught himself how to programme it. Once he had worked out the parts he needed for the headgear, he installed custom-made force sensors inside a helmet. With the help of his mentor and high school physics teacher, Elias Perez, he calculated the G-force equations the sensors would need to execute. Garcia had to come up with a solution for testing his device as well. “Right now, there’s not a testing method established for a system like this,” says Garcia. “Currently, football helmets are dropped on the ground during safety tests. With the help of my father, we created our own way of measuring how well the stabilizer was working.” The two set up a cannon that shot a projectile at the helmet and shoulder pads. When the projectile hit, they could measure in inches how well the stabilizer helped reduce the movement of a hypothetical player’s neck. From their tests, Garcia noted that his stabilizer could reduce injuries from 16 inches of motion to just 4 or 5.

Though the original intention was to reduce the amount and severity of concussions in football players, he’s had interest from the military as well, and even received a scholarship from the Navy to continue to develop his work. Now at Texas Tech, Garcia has decided to study computer engineering.

Keep in mind: All of this was before he graduated from high school. Even the mentor who started Garcia on the path had no idea what was coming. “When he showed me his project I was just floored,” said Elias Perez, a science teacher at Olton and Garcia’s mentor. “I’ve never seen anything that sophisticated come from a high school student.”