WASHINGTON – Easton LaChappelle has been absent from Mancos High School all week.
But he’s not playing hooky – he’s preparing to meet the president.
Easton, 17, has been invited to participate in the White House Science Fair on Monday. He’ll demonstrate his wirelessly controlled robotic hand and hopes to use it to shake Barack Obama’s.
“The president, I guess, has priority over school for this week,” Easton said in a telephone interview Friday.
Easton was 14 years old when he first came up with the idea of a robotic hand.
“At the time for me it was just kind of a cool idea that I got bored and I made,” Easton said. “But then I kept going with it, and I ended up using 3-D printers and newer materials and making everything better designwise.”
The arm that Easton will bring to the White House – which will be toted to D.C. as part of his carry-on luggage because it’s too fragile to check – can be controlled by thoughts, different facial expressions and blinking patterns from 10 feet away, he said.
Easton’s ideas have been featured on Nickelodeon and in the magazine Popular Mechanics. PBS hopes to do a documentary about him, the Herald previously reported.
He’s currently looking into the business angle of his idea and raised about $18,000 in a month through Kickstarter, a website dedicated to crowd-sourcing funding for entrepreneurs.
He placed second in engineering at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair last year, and hopes for a first-place win when he returns there next month.
But in the next three days, his focus is on the nation’s capital. He found out he was heading to D.C. – the farthest east he’s ever been – about a week ago.
“It’s still surreal; it hasn’t really hit me yet,” he said.
Staff Writer Chase Olivarius-McAllister contributed to this report.
