Our Mid-Grant Review was 'Sleet'!
Today is the 26th of March, and as of the 20th, Incline High School's Mid-Grant Technical Review is done! Our team had an amazing time presenting to the roughly 45 people who showed up. Our presentation went well and we are all proud of each other for getting up on stage and knowing everything we could about our invention.
Our guests were all incredibly receptive to our information and had their own opinions that they could share. Many were experts in their fields who we are hoping to contact again soon, such as Sandy, a local structural engineer who is offering us photos and data of various roof failures. We also had architects, civil engineers, and even a patent lawyer offering us feedback. Our online form that we used to collect feedback and ideas was also well received and we have gotten lots of good information from our visitors. Our community can also relate to our problem, with our leader, Chloe, asking if anyone had ever had cracked windows or doors that are harder to open in the winter due to a high snow load on their roof, with many people responding yes.
In order to get feedback efficiently, our group split roughly in half, into Group A and Group B, with Group A having a live discussion in the theater and Group B presenting a live demonstration in the hall. Group A had some civil engineers giving feedback as to what features may be valuable for our app in the future, such as connecting it to the weather app to predict what may happen in the future to a homeowner’s roof. It was recommended that we add a historical data center as well, so that individuals may see how their roof has performed over time. We also were told about our demonstration model and how we could make it more accurate to houses in the area. Group B got hands-on feedback from electrical and structural engineers on how we can scale our project and diversify it to be applicable to other building types.
All in all, we greatly appreciated all the feedback we got from our guests. We hope to keep in communication with many of them and continue to learn from their expertise. We also really appreciate and wish to give a special shout out to Dr. Estabrooks, the Invention Education Officer of the Lemelson-MIT Program, who was supposed to be at our original presentation in person but was unable to once we rescheduled. Instead, she dedicated time to watch our presentation online and even was present for when we were recieving feedback. After our presentation, we had a lovely call with her where she gave us her thoughts and ideas about our Mid-Grant Review, which was incredibly helpful and kind of her. Also, our fellow at MIT, Mr. Paul Fucile, reviewed our presentation with us and gave his own feedback which we are also especially grateful for.
Thank you to everyone who showed up and supported us and thank you Dr. Estabrooks and Mr. Fucile!
