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Date: 11/27/2023
AMHERST — A student invention team at Amherst Regional High School has become one of only eight school groups across the country to be awarded a grant to further work on a technological project designed to assist a public safety operation.
The $7,500 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering now designates the student collective at ARHS as an Inventeam, with the funding going towards their invention project, which is designed to offer a solution to problems currently existing with search and rescue operations. The invention itself seeks to improve the efficiency of those efforts, in hopes of accelerating the rescue endeavors and improving the survivability rate of those being sought.
Leigh Estabrooks is the invention education officer for the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam Program, which is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary awarding grants funded by the Lemelson Foundation out of Portland, Oregon. The program is named for founders, U.S. inventor Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife Dorothy “Dolly” Lemelson who began it in 1994.
“We’ve had prize programs at the Lemelson-MIT Program that we brought to a close over the past couple of years so that we could devote more of our energies and more of our resources in the latter part of what Jerome and Dolly wanted to do which was bring forward this next generation of young inventors and celebrate them as if they were rock stars or athletic stars, because they are our stars and we need them desperately.”
Despite that outlook, Estabrooks said the students are not involved in the invention programs to make a lot of money or to become famous.
“These young people [at Amherst Regional High School], they’ve just really stepped into the ownership of the problem that they’re working to solve and wanting to help first responders save people’s lives,” she said. “It’s just a wonderful outlook on their empathy and their desire to help others.”
Estabrooks does say that the InvenTeam program is very much like a sports team concept where members don’t begin at the top level but instead build a wealth of skills over time and through experience in managing communication, finance and community interaction. They also become mentors to the students coming up behind them.
John Fabel, an engineering and physics teacher at ARHS, coaches the InvenTeam, initiated the application and worked with the students on their final proposal.
“John had something extraordinary going on at Amherst Regional,” Estabrooks said. “He has a course called ‘Engineering for Social Good.’”
Estabrooks said one the major pushes within the program itself is to move invention education into the school day so it is not only available for those students who can participate in extracurricular activities and learning programs outside regular school hours.
“That’s not everyone,” she said.” So, this becomes a way of basically democratizing invention education, let’s get it in the school day for all to experience what it means to solve and implement technological solutions for real problems that they find in their own community.”
The selection process for the grants is based upon several factors, not simply the specific project or the group itself.
“It’s a combination of all,” Estabrook said. “It’s not just the program but it’s the school, the support the teacher has from the school district, the group of students and their passion for solving the problem and then it’s the project.”
She said it’s not an easy undertaking for the students despite inventing being what she called, “hard fun.”
“It’s going to be kind of rough because they’re going to be doing things that they’ve never done and applying their knowledge in different ways,” Estabrooks said, adding passion is a major factor and that was apparent within the application from ARHS’s IvenTeam.
Estabrooks said the hope is the students will gain experience in solving real-world problems with the technological inventions while also building diversity into those who patent and solve problems.
“We know that everyone can invent,” she said. “But not everyone has the opportunity to invent.”
The InvenTeam at ARHS will be working over the next eight months on furtherance of solutions and the construction of a working prototype that will undergo a technical review in February 2024.
A final prototype will then be showcased in June 2024 at EurekaFest, an invention celebration at MIT in Cambridge.