November Updates

Hello there!

The Archer School for Girls InvenTeam™ has had a busy but exciting November! After being chosen as an official InvenTeam, we hit the ground running.

To begin the month, we did some team building activities in the back lawn at our school. We played “Two Truths and a Lie” and “Human Knot” to get to know each other better. We even wore our bedazzled safety goggles (even though we didn’t need to) to get into the engineering spirit.

This month, we also worked together to set up our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and personal team blog. We hope that these social media platforms will help incorporate our broader school community in our work on our invention. We’ve brainstormed ideas for fundraising as well.

At Archer, we have an Invention and Product Development class that is focused on making our invention. But, we are also lucky enough to have twelve girls that aren’t in the class who make up our InvenTeam club that meets every Monday. This month, the club has designed our team mascot, Scout the Drought Trout. We will use it later on to promote our message to the greater public and fundraise.

When Leigh Estabrooks, Invention Education Officer at thLemelson-MIT Program, visited us, she gave us some important notes on our project description and tips on how to organize our team. She also announced to us that Paul Fucile, a senior engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, reached out to use to be our technical mentor throughout the year. Though we’ve only have two video conferences with him so far, he has already been such a help to our team.

To prepare for building our first prototypes, we found all measurements for our aerator and have designed a test fixture for our prototypes. We also began on programming for our device! Programming Lead Iman M. has familiarized herself with Arduino, which we will use when building our prototypes. This month she tested with potentiometers and sensors as well.

Heading into the next month, we’ve outlined our goals to make sure that we stay on track. Before the holidays, the Archer InvenTeam wants to build our first test faucet attachment and determine the best way to make it sustainable. We hope to begin designing and constructing our water meter system as well. On the communications side of things, we hope to organize a presentation to our school’s parent association for either December or January to get the word out about the Lemelson-MIT Program, what we are inventing, and hopefully earn donations that will help finance our project.

We are so excited to continue with our project and to keep you updated on what we are up to! Follow us on social media for a closer look on our process and events, we cannot wait to share this experience with you!

- The Archer School for Girls InvenTeam - Los Angeles, CA