November Blog Entry

What is HVPA? HVPA is a 6 year program based on the college campus at SUNY Ulster  Community College. Young Scholars start at grade 9 and go through high school and earn a 2 year degree in a technology field. HVPA’s InvenTeam is made up of subgroups that are filled by numerous students, of different ages, though most of the team is Chapter 1 (9th Graders). All of the lead roles are filled by Chapter 1s and the main body of the team is mostly Chapter 1s. HVPA’s overall goal for this project is to design, create, and patent a working tick detector. Before we made anything for the Tick Detector we researched what types of cameras can see ticks and if our invention was possible. The team then started to rapidly design what a tick detector would look like. We had Dr. Brian Leydet who is an assistant professor at SUNY ESF of epidemiology and disease ecology help us find out what ticks are most common on pets. We then started to set design goals on what parameters we had to meet with our rapid designs.

After this, we finalized our application to InvenTeams and we were accepted and had to form our “responsibility” teams. The members of each of these teams have their own job to do for the larger team as a whole.  An example is my role which is communications lead and my role on the communications team is to assign other people roles in communication, I also write the blogs. The people in CAD Design work on making the tick detector online using CAD programs, finance decides what purchases are going to be made, and researchers look into the different types of types of detecting ticks.

After we were split into these teams, to speed up the process we split up into smaller build teams to make physical representations of the tick detector itself. So far into this project we have been having fun and look forward to see how our invention turns out.