By Gargoyle news staff

Posted Thursday, May 17, 2007, The OG, news & student awards

UNI CHEMISTRY TEACHER David Bergandine and a group of 14 student inventors were selected this week to advance in the InvenTeams high school invention grants program.

Sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT Program, InvenTeams seeks to foster creativity and “excite high school students about science, math, engineering, entrepreneurship and invention.”

Each year, competing groups of students and their mentor are asked to find a problem that needs to be solved and then invent a prototype to try to overcome the problem.

In the spring, team mentors submit an initial application discussing their projects. From that first pool, “Excite Awards” are given to the mentors whose teams have been selected to submit a final application.

Uni's InvenTeam submitted an idea for an electronic voting system dubbed “SecureVote,” which implements various technologies and methods to greatly reduce fraud and other risks associated with modern e-voting machines.

Preliminary applications were reviewed, and Uni's team was one of just 35 in the nation invited to participate in the next round. These teams have been invited to submit the final application, due in September.

Up to 15 of those teams will be awarded grants of up to $10,000 for the research and actual development of their proposed invention.

The following students are on Uni's InvenTeam:

— Geoffrey Beck, junior
— Daniel Borup, sophomore
— TJ Bozada, junior
— Isaac Chambers, sophomore
— Aria Collopy, senior
— Julian Hartman, junior
— Jason He, sophomore
— Marika Iyer, junior
— Shivani Khanna, junior
— Paul Miller, sophomore
— Jacob Olshansky, junior
— Carl Pearson, sophomore
— Bhaskar Vaidya, junior
— Victoria Wang, senior

As the team's mentor, Bergandine has been named an InvenTeams Excite Award Teacher. He will attend the InvenTeams Odyssey at MIT from June 20 to 22.

At the Odyssey, the 2007 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams will showcase their inventions. The Uni group is hoping to be named a 2008 InvenTeam.

“I think our idea is very strong, and it should be a lot of fun to work on,” Chambers said. “And who knows, maybe in eight years our Uni students will be voting on our fail-safe electronic voting system when they go to the polls.”

Former InvenTeams' ideas include a modern high school locker, a neural-directed wheelchair (see video below), and an electrostatic air-purifying fan.

INVENTEAMS VIDEO: NEURAL-DIRECTED WHEELCHAIR

RELATED

— Gargoyle coverage: What's the big idea? (final section of Agora Days, Pt. 4)

— External link: Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams official site

— External link: Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams FAQ