October- November Progress Update
This is Kelly Cool and Poppy Cox from Stockbridge High School with our first Lemelson InvenTeam blog post. Since we heard the news on October 14th that our school had been chosen to receive the Lemelson-MIT grant, we’ve been working on promoting our team and its progress. Due to the accomplishments of our class’ over the previous years, we have been getting a lot of publicity from connections for this new project. Separately, we have also been receiving help from local establishments, which has been giving our project exposure.
To start off our project, we bonded as a team over the summer through scuba certification. In addition, we learned to work as a team while working through the grant application process.
We started the school year off with a trip to the St. Clair River working with a PhD candidate, Joe Krieger, from the University of Michigan. Joe Krieger is working on a research project which involved searching for young of year sturgeon. This is significant to our invention because the St. Clair River is where we will be using our final product in the first week of June, 2016. In addition, working in this real world environment bonded our team and showed how that we can make a difference if we come together.
Our team has also traveled to our state capital to tell the story of our new project. We used this opportunity to fundraise and gain connections that could help us throughout the year. While we were there, Michigan State Representative Tom Cochran recognized our InvenTeam for our hard work and dedication to STEM education. Recently, we have presented at a local Retirement Community to spread the word and work on our presentation skills.
We have progressed from an idea of an invention in September to a rough draft, and now we have a working prototype that we will be taking to Key Largo to test in early December along with at least 4 others just like it.
We were also featured on one of our local news channels during their ‘Schools Rule’ segment that showcased our prototypes and gave our team the opportunity to talk about the Lemelson-MIT grant and how we’ve come to work with it.
This week we had a phone conference with one of our mentors, Julie Hinderer. We discussed the status of the current camera system and the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission’s expectations of where our invention needs to by June. We are using the cameras in the St. Clair River to help them analyze why the sea lamprey are evading lampricide. The lampricide will be spread out on the surface of the water, and sinks down onto river bed. Our camera system will be placed in the river to monitor how the lampreys are evading the lampricide.
