Brentwood High Schools First Blog!

Upon receiving notice that the Brentwood High School InvenTeam had been awarded the 10k grant, our team was more motivated than ever! The Brentwood InvenTeam is working on a device that is able to monitor the health of salt marshes, in turn preventing coastal flooding and yearly erosion. Our device, “The Marsh Multi-Unit Sensor for CLimate and Ecosystem monitoring,” or in short, the Marsh M.U.S.C.L.E. The invention is providing researchers with a cost-effective sonde (an instrument probe) that will monitor the salt marshes pH, salinity, and temperature. This device will work in junction with a sensor on a coastal stress organism, Geaukensia demissa. These sensors will work together to track any environmental changes. In addition to our device, our team is heavily interested in incorporating our community and citizen science into our invention. As a team, we would like to introduce new methods of collecting data to all scientists as well as introducing devices like ours to either motivate or educate younger scientists.

Muscle

In the month of November, the Brentwood InvenTeam has been working hard. Our team lives by the idea that organization is the key to success. With that said, we began with the organization of our team. We divided our team into different sections to bring our invention to fruition. We allowed each person on our team to join a section where they believed they would thrive the best. These sections or categories include: communications, engineering and design, finance, research, and sustainability. Within each section, each has been setting goals and working diligently completing the following:

The Communications team has been working on blogs explaining our community engagement  and our progress. In addition, this team has set up our social medias as well as working on our website. This team has been in contact with our district's public relations representative and worked with our school and community newspaper.

Our Engineering and Design team has been really productive in the last month. Being that it took some time to set up and receive our orders to begin building our invention, this team has been proactive on researching and testing new codes on our own Arduino boards. Once we received our orders, the team began setting up the breadboards right away and continued to work on connecting the sensors for our prototype.

The Finance team has been in communication with many different companies setting up tax exemptions and making sure all of our transactions go smoothly. This team organizes our purchases in a google sheet to keep track of our budget by staying proactive on our purchases. 

Brentwood InvenTeam members

Our teams are dedicated to working on our invention. As a team, we are so incredibly thankful for receiving this grant and we are excited to help scientists in this field and hopefully introduce a new field of science to younger scientists with our cost-effective device!