Covered in sticky notes and pictures, the doors of the TIDES Garage in the library are being used to improve lives. The sticky notes have different problems those with food allergies face every day, from issues with traveling to the medical consequences of eating food that is an allergen. The photos show pictures of different meals and a prompt is scrawled on the whiteboard. All of this is the beginning steps of creating an invention for Project Invent.

Project Invent is a program where student teams research, design, and create a product that helps a marginalized group. The program’s goal is to empower students to invent and engineer to help others. Over 40 schools with maker spaces around the country choose a topic to focus their inventions on. This is the first year that Parker is participating in Project Invent. 

The program was founded by Connie Liu in January of 2018 as a way to create an educational program that prioritizes real-world problem-solving. Liu taught design thinking and engineering at the Nueva School, a Pre-K through 12 private school in California. 

She created a class where the students worked with a man named Jimmy, who was visually impaired, as their “community partner.” The students interview the community partner to learn and empathize with the problems he or she faces. Then, they design a product to help their partner with a problem they face. 

“It is giving students the opportunity to make a real-world impact on somebody who could benefit from something in their lives being improved,” Middle and Upper School Library and Information Specialist Annette Lesak said. Students “have to use design thinking, coding, inventing skills, and entrepreneurial skills to go through the process of designing and creating something for somebody to improve their lives.”

The class interviewed him to learn about the challenges that Jimmy faced and ultimately created a belt called the “Stria.” The belt vibrates when the user stops walking straight. The purpose is to help blind people walk in a straight path, especially in a city, so they don’t walk into traffic.

“I saw Connie speak at a conference maybe two or three years ago,” Lesak said, “and I was immediately so enchanted and so struck by the program because it’s a win-win across the board.” 

The topic for Parker’s team this year is helping people with severe nut allergies. Lesak worked with Lower and Intermediate School Library and Information Services Specialist Mary Catherine Coleman and Educational Technology Integration Specialist Sarah Beebe to choose the community partner for this year. The three researched different organizations, including social services and retirement homes. “I’m excited to bring this empowerment experience to Parker,” Lesak said. “I saw it as a good opportunity to focus on social good and forming relationships with your community partner.” 

Coleman and Beebe decided to find a community partner within their own community, reaching out to Junior Grayson Schementi. “I’m excited to be able to use a student made product–whatever it ends up being–to help me live a fuller life,” Schementi said.

“I decided to join Project Invent because I’m really interested in anything related to the medical field,” freshman Krystal Xu said. “I have really enjoyed Project Invent so far.”

This year, the Project Invent team consists of four freshmen and five sophomores. They meet on Wednesdays during MX. Some students meet in the morning from 7:30 to 8:00 and some meet during H5. They will continue to meet until April. If all of the components are completed, the team will visit New York for “Demo Day” to pitch their inventions. 

During Demo Day, the teams present their inventions to top investors and tech executives. Each invention is given the opportunity to receive funding from these investors. Last year, a team from Washington created an adaptive keyboard and mouse to let people with limited motor skills use a computer. The project received an award of $1000. “It’s very exciting to see if what I make with my teammates would actually help some people in the world who suffer from food allergies,” Xu said. 

Currently, the team is brainstorming, interviewing, and creating lists and diagrams to understand the issues that Schementi and others with severe food allergies face. “Project Invent is finding ways to improve my life, living with food allergies, by inventing something that can benefit me,” said Schementi.

For one project, they took photos of everything they ate, in order to feel what it is like to analyze every piece of the food that they ate in the way Schementi does. They have begun learning how to code and use Arduino hardware to assist them in their designs. 

“It’s powerful for students who are part of it because they get to really change somebody’s life for the positive,” Lesak said. “It’s empowering for them because they get to use creativity and use empathy and use coding and design skills that maybe they didn’t think they had to build something.”