Hundreds of middle schoolers from across the D.C. region gathered at the KID Museum in Bethesda, Maryland, Sunday to showcase their inventions meant to improve life on Earth.
The annual “Invent the Future Expo” allows students, most of whom are middle schoolers within Montgomery County Public Schools, the opportunity to spend a semester researching, prototyping and ultimately building an invention centered around the challenge question: “What will you make to improve life on this planet?”
“We have examples of kids who are figuring out how to reduce pollution by creating more access to green roofs. We have kids who are solving social problems and improving mental health for their classmates,” said Cara Lesser, founder and executive director of KID Museum.
“So it’s really an incredible array and shows what’s on kids’ minds and what things that they’re working to solve.”
Around 650 students, split into 120 teams, had their projects judged for an opportunity to win prizes. As students showcased their projects, the expo also featured industry leaders presenting innovations including virtual reality, rocket simulators and even a robot dog.
Enlin Xu, a teacher at Parkland Middle School who’s been working with the Invent the Future Expo for about five years, said the students keep a digital engineering notebook detailing every step throughout the semester.
He said students go through a lot of prototyping, redoing and sometimes scraping the entire project and starting over before creating a final product.
“My favorite part of watching these kids do the Invent the Future challenge is definitely when they start feeling like something’s coming together,” Xu said.
“They really start seeing it physically in front of them and then especially their reaction when they realize just how big this event is and how big the engineering world is.”
One group of Xu’s students invented what they call a “VDRS Super Drone” designed to clear trash from marketplaces in India.
“We could see trash on the market streets, so we decided to make an invention that could pick up that trash without needing human help [ …] we put a claw on the drone that works with electricity, and it works with solar energy, with like the solar panels, and it has an air filter to clean out the air,” one student engineer said.
In their presentations, some students detailed challenges they were forced to work around. For example, the VDRS Super Drone group said they worked on a few different claw designs before landing on the right one for their drone.
Another group invented a mobile homeless shelter to be used in New York, which they named “Yello Billy.” The cardboard prototype features solar panels, a refrigerator, a bed and bathroom and a telephone “for calling loved ones,” according to the student engineers.
“At the end of the day, what we are about is helping kids to develop a mindset, what we call the ‘mind of a maker.’ It’s really about understanding that you learn through trial and error, that you learn by taking on new challenges, and you learn by stopping and reflecting and understanding what you can do with tech,” Lesser said.
“What are the human pieces you need to bring to complement tech and how you can make an impact on the world.”
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