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| Ben Waldman, Mac Devlin, and David Choi play with the electronic cane developed by the InvenTeam at the science fair held at Bromfield in February. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz) |
Every Thursday night a group of about 15 students can be found gathered in Bromfield’s room 279, sharing pizza and trading ideas on perfecting the invention they created, which is destined to be unveiled in June at the 2009 EurekaFest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students, members of Bromfield’s InvenTeam, have been working all year to develop an assistive device for the blind, a "virtual cane," a project funded by a $7,500 grant from the InvenTeam initiative created by the Lemelson-MIT program.
Jerome Lemelson, for whom the MIT program was named, was one of the country’s most prolific inventors, holding more than 600 U.S. patents. Lemelson spent his life dedicated to the process of invention, and in the 1990s he and his wife, Dorothy, established the Lemelson Foundation to encourage invention and entrepreneurship. According to the Lemelson Foundation website, "Automated manufacturing systems and bar code readers, automatic teller machines, cordless phones, cassette players and camcorders, fax machines, and personal computers—even crying baby dolls derived from Lemelson’s innovations."
The Lemelson-MIT program was established in 1994, funded by the Lemelson Foundation to recognize and encourage outstanding inventors. A few years later, the program launched the InvenTeam initiative, designed to get high school students excited about inventing. High school teams, made up of students, teachers, and adult mentors, can receive grants of up to $10,000 to develop solutions to real-world problems. According to the organization’s website, the program encourages students to "rely on inquiry and hands-on problem solving as they apply lessons from science, technology, engineering, and math to develop invention prototypes." Now in its third year, the EurekaFest celebrates those inventions and the students behind them.
Bromfield has been participating in the InvenTeam program since the 2006–2007 school year. Science teacher Gary Menin is the team coordinator. There are eight adult mentors: Kevin Donahue, John McGoldrick, Mike Mintz, Barbara Petroulis, John Rizzo, Sharon Schmidt, Karl Schwiegershausen, and Gary Wenger. Team members are from the ranks of all classes at Bromfield, including freshmen Lindsay Cannon, David Rizzo, and Matt Schmidt; sophomores Andrew Hong, Peter Moberly, and Jeff Yates; junior Mac Devlin; and seniors David Choi, Annette Chu, Pasquale Eckert, Arjuna Hayes, Brian Lynch, Ben Waldman, Jacob Waldman, and Shunan Zhao.
This year’s team members have been working on a project since the spring of the 2007–2008 school year, when they held brainstorming sessions with outgoing seniors who had been on the previous team. They settled on the idea of a virtual cane to assist the blind.
To determine the feasibility of this project, team members met with representatives from the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting independent living for the blind, and with representatives from Audio Journal, a nonprofit radio service that broadcasts news and information to visually impaired residents of Worcester County. The feedback students received was that one of the biggest challenges faced by those who are blind is detecting overhangs, objects that aren’t within the normal range of distance of a cane tapping on the ground. This is the challenge the team decided to solve.
With an idea in mind, team members paid a visit to Hampshire College in Amherst to see Colin Twitchell, founding director of the Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center at the school. According to Bromfield senior Brian Lynch, one of the InvenTeam’s two team leaders, Twitchell led the group on a tour of the development center and "taught them a lot about the invention process."
The team brainstormed some ideas about how they could help a blind person detect overhangs, and armed with pointers from Twitchell, came up with the idea of a device that could be added to a cane. After applying for a grant from the InvenTeam program, the team was awarded $7,500 last September to work on the virtual cane project. The project has also garnered the support of the Harvard Lions Club, a champion of sight programs since 1925, which presented the team with a check for $750 in March. Lions member Bob Kinnee told the Press this month, "Even if this particular project doesn’t directly translate into a useful product, the research and effort going into it could indirectly lead to something useful for the blind."
According to Leigh Estabrooks, Invention Education Officer for the InvenTeam program, the $7,500 grant was money invested by the program not in a specific outcome or product, but in the educational process. The goal of the program, she said, is to teach students "how to live creative and inventive lives." In an interview this week Estabrooks said, "We’re hoping these kids go on to college and continue being inventive. It’s really about invention education."
The funding provided by the InvenTeam program helps teams purchase materials, but more importantly, buys them the freedom to experiment and test out their many ideas. As of February Bromfield’s team had three to four prototypes in different stages of development.
In a February interview with the Press, team members described their project, and the workings of the team. Co-team leader Arjuna Hayes explained that the team is divided into subgroups, each handling a different aspect of the project: the Tech Team, led by Mac Devlin, explores the details around actually building the device; the administration group monitors the budget; and the public relations group reaches out to the media, to bring visibility to the project, and will ultimately give a presentation on the team’s invention at EurekaFest.
Team leaders Hayes and Lynch talked about the importance of adult involvement with the team.
"We have tons and tons of parents and mentors who’ve volunteered to give us a hand," Lynch said.
"We wouldn’t be very far without them," Hayes added.
Asked how he would gauge the team’s success at the end of the year, Hayes said, "I don’t think the end results matter. It’s what we’ve learned: how to get a grant, how to work with people, how to work with a big group. It’s like herding cats made of Jell-O."
Speaking about his role on the team, Lynch said, "My job is to keep us from sitting around chatting and not getting stuff done—making sure we keep focused. I’m the cattle prod behind the cats."
Lynch acknowledged that the project was a lot of work, but emphasized how much fun it was: "Creation is the most important part of this. Every time you try something, you learn. Learning 900 ways not to make a light bulb can be useful."
The actual form of the device continues to change as students progress in their understanding of what they’re doing. What started out as an add-on to a cane had morphed into a vest as of the February meeting. Lynch said the team felt that the closer the sensor is to a person’s head, the more effective it would be. He went on to explain that although a cane could help detect a drop-off, it wasn’t effective at detecting an overhang. Team members fashioned a vest out of an old backpack and duct tape, and mounted on the front of it a device that would send out ultrasound signals to detect obstructions. At first they considered having the device send out an audible warning message, but realized that because a blind person depends so heavily on the sense of sound to determine what’s happening around him, an audible warning might interfere with that process. At the February meeting the team was testing a device that would give a vibrating alarm.
"Our goal is to get a prototype to work as well as it possibly can," Lynch said, adding, "In terms of realizing what we wanted the invention to do, we’re not that far away."
The big milestone for the team is the annual EurekaFest, which will be held June 24 to 27. Lynch explained, "EurekaFest is not a contest—it’s a showcase to the world of what you’ve done." Asked what happens to this creative effort after that, Hayes said, "It would be a dream come true" to have it continue toward the development of an actual marketable product, but noted there would be "at least another year of development" involved. He said he thought there was enough interest among junior team members to have the project continue next year.
Estabrooks said that "a few" student inventions have been picked up by sponsors and followed through to patent, but emphasized that isn’t the point of the InvenTeam program.
"What the kids take forward is the process of being inventive," she said.