A team of 16 students from Charles R. Drew Charter Senior Academy in Atlanta is among 13 teams nationwide awarded the Lemelsom-MIT InvenTeams grant to invent solutions that solve real-world problems. The team’s invention is a device to record police-civilian interaction in personal automobiles.
“As a police officer approaches the vehicle, a recorded warning that the interaction is being recorded and will be available to the public is played,” said team representative Alexandria Girault. “At the same time the driver of the vehicle can begin recording a video that will ultimately be uploaded to a public domain. All police interactions that are recorded will be temporarily stored in a private database and will eventually be published to a public site. Through the crowdsourcing of videos collected by our device, we will increase transparency in police interactions with the community while creating a library of police work that is attached to each police officer.”
The team will be honored June 15 to 17 at the 15th annual EurekaFest, a virtual celebration presented by the Lemelson-MIT Program that empowers student inventors, honors role models, and encourages creativity and problem solving. In addition to presentations from the 13 teams, collegiate recipients who won the 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize will also showcase their inventions.
InvenTeams are groups of high school students, educators and mentors that receive up to $10K in grant funding to invent technological solutions to real-world problems of their own choosing.
After the InvenTeam experience, inventive cultures often continue to prosper at schools through further development of InvenTeam prototypes or the pursuit of new invention projects. To date, twelve InvenTeams have patents for their InvenTeam projects, although, patents are not a requirement.
Other InvenTeams this school year include students from Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, New Jersey, New York, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Information: www.lemelson.mit.edu/inventeams.
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