On Tuesday, April 26, the Berlin Central School’s InvenTeam will be hosting an Open House event showcasing a prototype of their invention, announced teacher and facilitator Dawn Wetmore. The event will be held at the Berlin Middle High School cafeteria at 7 pm and is open to the public.
The team’s idea is an adaptive sports device (ASD) for the deaf or hearing impaired to participate in sporting activities such as skiing, snowboarding, rollerblading, jogging and bicycling by warning them of traffic approaching from behind so they can avoid collisions. Team sponsor Jiminy Peak provided lift tickets in order for the team to field test the device this winter. The Zone B District of the Lions Club pledged a monetary donation for the provisional patent application. The RPI Materials Lab fabricated the device casing on their 3-D printer from CAD files designed by the students.
Out of more than 300 applicants, Berlin Middle High School was one of only 14 schools in the nation awarded an InvenTeam grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program this school year. The team’s prototype will be presented in June at MIT in Cambridge, MA, at the EurekaFest which celebrates the invention process.
Inspired by the InvenTeam’s slogan “making life better one invention at a time,” the students are proud and excited that their idea could not only help people, but, as team member Andrew Zlotnick said, “It could save someone’s life.” The InvenTeam students range in age from 11 to 18. The team also includes seniors Llewellyn Palmer and Toby Goodermote, sophomores Kelsey O’Dell, Chiara Dreher and Connor Brown, eighth-grader Tim Shupe, seventh-grader Emma Woolley and Ioann Popov, a sixth-grader.
For more information about the Berlin InvenTeam visit their website at http://websites.nylearns.org/dwetmore/2009/11/18/165923/page.aspx. For more information about the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam, visit web.mit.edu/inventeams.