Young inventors set out to solve old problems

For 18 teams of teen inventors, months of brainstorming, building, and testing finally culminated last weekend at the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Odyssey.

Rather than pitting students against one another for awards, the program vets project ideas at the start of the school year and gives grants of up to $10,000. Each team comes up with its own problem to solve.

When students arrive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from public and private schools across America, it's a chance for them to show off prototypes and hear feedback from fellow teams, members of the MIT community, and local businesspeople.

Teams are encouraged to collaborate with university and business partners. That requires a range of skills, including project management and public relations. The hope is that even students who don't see themselves as math or science whizzes will think more broadly about careers in these fields.

"It's essentially a small company, and everybody can find a place," says Joshua Schuler, InvenTeams grants officer.

Thirty percent of the participants are female, and 40 percent of the teams include underrepresented minorities – numbers that Mr. Schuler hopes to increase. Encouraging that diversity creates a better pipeline to fill the high demand for scientists and engineers, he notes.

InvenTeams is one of the activities of the Lemelson-MIT Program, created in 1994 and named after prolific 20th-century inventor Jerome Lemelson. Funds come from the private Lemelson Foundation, which is dedicated to honoring and inspiring inventors.

Here are a few projects:

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va.
Neural-directed wheelchair

Biology teacher Paul Cammer must be a pretty trusting guy. He sits in a wheelchair, wearing a black cap from which blue wires protrude. Scurrying around him is a team of seven students, some peering over his shoulder at a laptop, others poking at switches in a cardboard box attached to the back of the chair, where the wires from his head attach to a device that sends wireless signals to the laptop.

If Mr. Cammer looks tense, that's OK. When he's tense, the signals from his brain turn the wheelchair left. When he's relaxed, it turns right. His EEG cap (short for "electroencephalogram") detects small voltage changes from his brain activity. The students calibrate the laptop to direct the chair according to those patterns.

They worked with scientists from the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

During the demo, a few students stay nearby, ready to grab the chair if it veers too close to inattentive bystanders. The control isn't as precise as they'd like, but "it's really satisfying to actually see him turning around and doing tricks," says team member Dan Klayton.

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