Bloom Students Widely Accepted By MIT

For the week of June 15-June 19, 2011, Bloom High School’s Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam presented to hundreds of teachers, MIT professors, students and potential investors. Lupe Avalos, John Carvajal-Raga, Michelle Patzelt, Vincent Redman, and Stephan Riley did a fantastic job pitching their innovation, the Solar Powered Oil Recovery Center (SPORC).

The process they invented is capable of filtering particulates from waste cooking oil, removing residual water and pumping the oil even when it is hot with no damage to the user. It can then store up to fifty-five gallons of filtered, dewatered oil. Their invention can be used at schools, restaurants, hospitals, and other places that use vegetable oil deep fryer.

The team also participated in several academic sessions with real-world inventors and innovators. On Thursday, they heard from Nate Bell who is the inventor of the “Ascender,” a repelling device that is now used by the US military and civilian emergency teams. The students also heard from Eliot Cohen from the Entrepreneurship Center at MIT and Kate Midi from MIT’s Public Service Center. They both spoke about marketing skills and that when talking to others, either personally or professionally, that 55% is body language, 38% is tone and only 7% are the words that are used.

On Friday, they heard from Kavita Shukla describe how, as a freshman in high school, her grandmother gave her an ancient herbal remedy. After testing the remedy throughout high school and college, she developed a coating for fruit and vegetable containers that inhibits bacterial and fungal growth! Tom Koulopolous of the Delphi Group spoke about true innovation as a way of taking existing items and changing, adding, and/or subtracting them to make the item more useful to a different audience. The team then participated in a ten minute challenge where they were given a Ziploc bag of miscellaneous garbage to build a “vehicle” that would carry two ping pong balls across the stage. Bloom’s team didn’t fare well, but did learn about innovation that they applied on Saturday.

The Boston Museum of Science hosted an all-day invention challenge. For “Heavy Metal IV,” the students were given a small pile of PVC, cardboard, duct tape and other miscellaneous items. They spent the next four hours designing, innovating and constructing a device that could lift a garbage can up to three stories using only the wind from an industrial fan. The results varied from “no lift off” to a three story lift. Amongst the teams, Lupe Avalos’ won the award for “Most Risk-Taking” for their four-foot pinwheel design.

All in all, the students were excited, tired and inspired. Very little time was spent sleeping and their waking hours were spent learning, growing, exploring, bonding and meeting others from around the country. During our final day, Leigh Estabrooks, Lemelson-MIT Invention Education Officer, joked with us that one didn’t participate in EurekaFest as much as you survive it. There’s an old saying “…getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from of a fire hose;” this seems to be true of even three-day conferences.