This article explores the development of high school students’ identities as inventors at the end of their participation in the national InvenTeams™ invention education initiative sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT Program. Our study was guided by an interactional ethnographic perspective through which we sought to understand students’ emic perspectives as to why they did or did not see themselves as inventors after working as inventors across the school year.

Biogen Community Labs’ programming went online in the summer of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, joining forces with the Lemelson-MIT Program to preserve a learning opportunity for 400 high school students, especially those underrepresented in STEM. Research and data collected from the students and their experiences during the program suggest that the program helped URM students realize the value of biology and life science.