A group of 15-year-old students—Akhil Nagori, Evann Sun, and Lucas Shengwen Yen from Santa Clara, California—won a $10,000 prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge for creating AI-powered smart glasses that translate text to speech in real time, all for under $100. The wearable device, designed to assist visually impaired students, uses a camera to capture text, processes it with a custom AI model, and delivers spoken audio through built-in speakers in the glasses frames. The project was inspired by Nagori’s visit to India, where he saw his great-uncle, a visually impaired cashier, struggling to read braille receipts by hand. “He has all these boxes filled with braille receipts. He has to go through them line by line,” Nagori said. “I said, ‘There’s got to be an easier way.’” The team set out to build a low-cost, practical solution. The glasses are built using a Raspberry Pi, a small computer board, a camera, a battery, and custom-designed frames made with Fusion 360 and a 3D printer. The team focused on size and comfort, ensuring the device fits middle and high school students. They also prioritized battery life, knowing the glasses would need to last a full school day. To train the AI, the team collected and labeled 800 images from textbooks and educational materials, capturing them under different lighting conditions—classroom, low light, and outdoor—to improve real-world performance. They used a custom convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) to process the text, achieving over 90% accuracy in their tests. The average processing time was about 13 seconds. The journey wasn’t without setbacks. Just hours before their national presentation, a critical soldering connection on the Raspberry Pi came loose, rendering the glasses inoperable. The team scrambled, and Yen’s father rushed to a local hardware store to get a soldering iron. The three worked through the night, wearing masks, to fix the issue. Despite the last-minute crisis, the team’s hard work paid off. They not only won the $10,000 prize for their project but also earned individual honors: Nagori received the Thermo Fisher Scientific Leadership Award, and Sun was awarded $10,000 for the Lemelson Foundation Award for Invention. The competition is highly selective, with only 300 students chosen from around 2,000 applicants nationwide after local science fairs. The finalists present their work in Washington, D.C., where judges evaluate both innovation and execution. Now in the prototype phase, the team plans to scale their project with a $5,000 grant. They are already working on producing more units, with 30 sets currently being assembled in Nagori’s garage, each equipped with a Raspberry Pi, camera, battery, and other components. Their goal is to bring the glasses to schools across California, making assistive technology more accessible to students in need.