CLEVELAND — Cleveland has the highest crime rate in Ohio, and some students from Cleveland Metropolitan School District are trying to combat it.

What You Need To Know

  • Group of students from MC2STEM School built a robot trash can

  • Their idea is to reduce crime by cleaning up the neighborhood

  • The project is still a work in progress, but they hope to finish it by graduation

Mekhi Blevins, a sophomore at MC2STEM High School said that crime is a problem in his community.

“We associated and found multiple studies that trash does equate to crime and my kind of slogan I guess was how you see it is how you treat it, so if a place is dirty and run down you’re going to treat it like its dirty and run down,” he said.

Which is how the idea for a robot trash can was born. The teacher helping the students on the project, Raquel Abrams-Jackson, is excited about what her students are doing.

“They wanted to do a fun way of getting people to put stuff in the trash can,” she said.

It is basically a normal trash can that’s on top of a robot that’s able to move.

“They can be remote controlled or they can be controlled through AI with their own movements. They open up and down,” Blevins said.

Abrams-Jackson said the students are planning to add more to the robot, like sound effects and moving around without a remote controller. She expressed how proud she is of her students.

“I’m really wondering where these kids are gonna be because they are…amazing,” she said.

The students will work on the project for the rest of high school with the hope of it ending up on the streets of Cleveland to help clean up the community. Blevins explained how lucky he feels to be able to experience this hands on learning.

“It’s so cool to have the amount of freedom of creativity that we have,” he said.