Winter Holiday Blog
❄️🎄🎅🏽Sending Holiday Cheer 🎅🏽🎄❄️
From The Calistoga HeatSync InvenTeam
Our team has been extremely busy during this Holiday Season! We held a “Mini” Mid-grant Technical Review and Media Day at our school on December 7th. Sonoma State Electrical Engineering, Calistoga Fire department, Napa Valley Farmworkers and Agricultural field workers* additionally participated with the media. We did a lot of fundraising including a Holiday Cake Walk, and the team stuffed over 500 envelopes heading out to all of the local Napa Valley Wineries for the New Year! We were blessed with a new valuable Administrative Lead Volunteer, Douglas Allan, who has an MBA and Entrepreneurship experience with 3 patents to his name! Additionally, UC Berkeley has been back to help support us again with experts answering our Engineering questions.
*The Calistoga High School InvenTeam is additionally a pilot site for Lemelson-MIT Program’s Inventing Smart Solutions class for inventive high school students. The class explores the process of inventing from problem finding to customer identification culminating in prototyping a useful and unique smart solution – an invention. The class will also be exploring other smart solutions for Agricultural Field Workers as part of this pilot program. Other pilot sites for Inventing Smart Solutions include Pioneer High School (Woodland, CA) and Greenbrier East High School (Lewisburg, WVA).*
Calistoga HeatSync InvenTeam’s Achievements & Progress
“Mini” Mid-Grant Technical Review and Media Day Held On December 7th
Sonoma State Electrical Engineering were the Rock Stars of our party! They took a close look at our InvenTeam’s current cooling designs and Arduino technology and gave us advice and feedback. They additionally listened closely to the needs of our Calistoga Fire department and Napa Valley Farmworkers and Agricultural field workers*.
Engineering and Material Science Specialists at UC Berkeley
Based on feedback from Sonoma State Electrical Engineers after December 7th, we contacted UC Berkeley again for some expert guidance on our design. Thankfully, we visited UC Berkeley last May of 2023 and met some amazing people there who have continued to support us. We are very grateful for them. (We've included a nice photo collage of the UC Berkeley School of Engineering field trip below for those of you who have never been.) Dr. Lizzie Hager-Barnard (has a Doctoral Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University and an S.B. in materials science and engineering from M.I.T.) and her husband Ed, who additionally holds degrees in Materials Science and Engineering have answered questions for us. Thank you both very much!
Administration, Media & Fundraising
Our Administration team has been blessed with a new valuable Administrative Lead Volunteer, Mr. Douglas Allan. Mr. Allan has the following credentials: University of California, Irvine - The Paul Merage School of Business with an MBA (Masters of Business Administration), Marketing, Strategy. Cornell University in Hotel Administration, Restaurant/Beverage Management. He has really helped guide our InvenTeam on how to go beyond our tiny little town for fundraising. He counseled our team on how to write a professional fundraising letter and then our InvenTeam stuffed over 500+ envelopes, which will be going out to all of our local Napa Valley Wineries on New Year's Day! We hope to get a response of support. 🍇😁
Media Day
We additionally hosted media on December 7th. Napa Valley Education Foundation is working on making us a video to help support our fundraising efforts. Our administration answered many interview questions by camera crews and the press.
❄️🎅🏽👨🏾🚒❤️🔥Holiday Cake Walk Fundraiser❄️🎅🏽👨🏾🚒❤️🔥
Our InvenTeam really had a lot of fun interacting with the community and running a cake walk at our local Calistoga Christmas Fair. There were a lot of happy faces when they won a delicious cake that our Administration team baked themselves, and of course a visit from Santa and our Calistoga Firefighters put smiles on everyone’s faces!
InvenTeam Instagram account @calistoga_lmit_inventeam, Facebook account @Calistoga L-mit InvenTeam, and a functioning GoFundMe titled "Calistoga Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam Trip & Program" . Our new LinkedIn Profile is L-MIT Inventeam Calistoga. Instagram currently has 211 followers and Facebook has 24, we hope to grow more as we go. Our networking and fundraising efforts have gotten us 53 donations with a total of $22,396 on GoFundMe so far.
Press
Calistoga Living Magazine:
