Sohail Abdulla was the Skills Bright Sparks 2013 supreme winner.
His project, a robotic window cleaner, was the culmination of two years hard work. He came up with the idea after seeing his father struggling to clean due to back and knee pain.
Following his success at Skills Bright Sparks, Sohail took his project to the Taiwan International Science Fair, where he gained fourth place.
He also won the American Ambassador Outstanding Award at the annual Realise the Dream awards, jetting to Phoenix, Arizona, for the INTEL International Science and Engineering Fair. He placed third in the engineering category.
Sohail is now in his second year of mechatronics engineering at Auckland University. He still has plans to continue refining his Bright Sparks invention, aiming to give it the ability to traverse over ledges.
"The idea is to develop it to clean high-rise buildings. A lot of people have lost their lives cleaning the windows up high," Sohail says.