InvenTeam in the Oregonian
This article ran about the Oregon Inventor’s Conference on Saturday:
High school inventors dream it, build it, show it
Science – Four Oregon teams display their inventions at PSU, then head for MIT in June
Sunday, April 22, 2007
RICHARD L. HILL
The Oregonian
The budding inventor beams as he describes a mobile device that one day may bring electricity to a remote village in a developing country.Jeff Lewis, a senior at Newberg High School, points to a 10-foot-wide dish that concentrates the sun’s rays onto a Sterling engine that operates on external heat.
“We keep fine-tuning it, and maybe it will be very useful to someone,” says Lewis, who is a member of a student team that is developing the “Solar Sterling Generator.”
The dozen-member Newberg group and teams from Hillsboro, Gresham and Westview high schools showed off prototypes of their inventions Saturday as part of the Oregon Inventor’s Showcase at Portland State University.
The four teams began work on their inventions last fall after their proposals won $10,000 grants from the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams program, funded by the Portland-based Lemelson Foundation. A panel of faculty and alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professional inventors and engineers selected the four Oregon projects along with those from 16 other high schools nationwide. The InvenTeams will exhibit their inventions in June at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
“This project has been challenging, but it gives you hands-on experience with how to create a useful product,” said Lewis, who plans to study mechanical engineering at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.
At a table next to the Newberg squad, 17-year-old Reilly Hamilton of Hillsboro High described his team’s “Heads-Up Display” for autos. The easy-to-install device projects an image on the lower part of a car’s windshield that displays speed and fuel level so the driver doesn’t have to look down at the dashboard.
“We’re still working on a smaller device that you can fit in your car’s glove box or CD holder,” Hamilton said.
The Westview InventTeam is developing a tactile graphing calculator that enables visually impaired math students to feel the graphs they produce.
The Gresham team is creating a “Drip-Irrigation System” that can water houseplants automatically based on the soil’s moisture content.
“We’re also hoping to make this irrigation system a Web-based device so that people can water the plants in their house while they’re on vacation,” said James Lao, a 15-year-old junior.
The teachers who advise the teams say the students learn how to work together in designing and making their inventions.
“This is totally student-developed,” said Eric Walters, a physics teacher at Westview. “It’s fun to see what these kids can do when given the resources. You see them grow as individuals and as a team.”
Dorothy Lemelson, co-founder of the Lemelson Foundation that she started with her late husband, Jerome Lemelson, one of the nation’s most prolific inventors, said she was impressed with the student inventors’ enthusiasm.
“These young people become inspired about learning math and science when they create an invention,” Lemelson said. “This country needs this.”
Many of the students on the four InvenTeams work on their projects after school a couple of days a week.
“But we’ve found that the further we get with the invention, the more excited we become, and the more time we put into it,” Newberg’s Lewis said. “We want to just keep going.”