Several members of Inventors Club at a recent meeting. Clockwise from bottom left: Eric Fritzsche, Tej Chajed, Chumin Gao, Hadley Hauser, Daniel Cheng, Danny Ge, Elizabeth Allen, Elizabeth Russell, Andrew Weatherhead. Photo from Inventors Club's Belize Project blog (click to enlarge)

URBANA — The Uni High Inventors Club just hit the jackpot, having received a $7,620 grant to develop their project, The New ERA: Effluent Removal Apparatus.

The 13-member club was one of just 15 teams nationwide to be selected to participate in the 2009-10 MIT-Lemelson InvenTeams initiative. The selections were announced today.

The club, sponsored by chemistry teacher David Bergandine, will use its InvenTeams grant to work on the New ERA project during the remainder of the school year. But what, exactly, does that project entail?

Inventors Club has been collaborating for the past year with Timothy Smith, a biologist working with the World Wildlife Fund, to develop a cost-effective device to harness waste from the outflowing canals of shrimp farms, where shrimp are grown in large quantities for food production. The device would allow the farms to reuse that waste in the form of nutrients for the shrimp.

This is an important advance because waste produced by shrimp farms can enter the ocean and severely harm the ecosystem by killing coral reefs, the home of many aquatic organisms.

"Nitrogen in water leads to algal bloom, which depletes oxygen levels," said club president Elizabeth Allen, a senior. "This device will grow, collect, and transport algae to the shrimp ponds as food to remove it from entering the environment."

The club is focusing on shrimp farms in Belize, where Smith, the father of senior Nathan Smith, is currently working, though it aims for the device to be applicable to shrimp farms around the world.

Origins of the project

Besides the Uni High Inventors Club, only 14 other teams from across the country won a 2009-10 InvenTeams grant. Gargoyle screenshot of Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams official site (click to enlarge)

Inventors Club has been been around for about a year. According to Allen, both the club and the project trace their beginnings to an e-mail that Bergandine sent when he was looking for students who would be interested in applying for an InvenTeams grant.

"So that was our original goal when we first began meeting, but since then we have broadened our scope of activity with the starting of the club," Allen said. "This will be our main focus for the rest of the year."

Coming up with an idea for a project wasn't easy. The students weren't sure where to start.

"So I sent an e-mail to parents asking them to come in and talk about their fields of work and the processes of invention, hoping to spark some brainstorming among the group," Allen recalled. "Mr. Smith was one of the first who came in to talk to us, and he introduced us to his Belizean shrimp farming project."

Smith told the students about the need to find sustainable ways to eliminate high-nutrient waste water.

"People depend heavily on marine natural resources around shrimp farms, and they need those farms to operate cleanly," Smith said in an e-mail interview with the Gargoyle. "That issue applies not only to shrimp farms, but to a variety of industries and services all over the world. The group really liked the idea of tackling an environmental problem with global environmental implications, so off we went." 

The club now has 13 students working on the project: Allen, Ge, their fellow seniors Tej Chajed, Daniel Cheng, Amy Ding, Eric Fritzsche, Chumin Gao, Hadley Hauser, Diana Liu, Elizabeth Russell, Andrew Weatherhead, and juniors Adam Joseph and Victoria Wong.

"When I think about the students … I think first about their potential to envision a better world where they are actively engaged in confronting and solving solving problems in a positive way," Smith said. "That is perhaps the most valuable natural resource on the planet, and I'm encouraged to see them pick up the challenge."  

A helping hand

Shrimp aquaculture ponds in Belize. Photo from Inventors Club's Belize Project blog (click to enlarge)

To fund their project, club members obtained a $750 grant from the Makino Foundation in June. Their larger grant, however, has come from the InvenTeams program.

Students participating in InvenTeams use problem-solving skills as they apply lessons from science, technology, engineering, and math to develop invention prototypes.

The slogan on the program's site — "Excite, Empower, Encourage" — summarizes InvenTeams' goals, which coincide with those of Inventors Club.

"Our [general] goal right now is to just explore the process of invention and innovation and to just have fun and help out where we can," said club member Danny Ge, a senior.

InvenTeams began funding projects in 2002. Since then, the program has provided grants to more than 95 teams, hailing from high schools across the United States. Each group of high school students, teachers, and mentors applied for a grant of up to $10,000.

Applying for the grant

Waste from shrimp ponds. Photo from Inventors Club's Belize Project blog (click to enlarge)

The application itself consists of a detailed background research summary for the project, a proposed budget for the grant money, a roster for the group, a structured timeline outlining the group's projected progress, and a list of collaborators and mentors on the project.

The amount each group receives is dependent on how much they request in the budget section of their application. Inventors Club actually received $320 more than it asked for.

For club members, preparing the application was a stressful ordeal.

"It was hectic," said Liu, who is the club's secretary-treasurer. "We were rewording and reworking up to the last day, but it really pushed our progress along and, most interestingly, taught us what a real grant proposal should look and sound like. You really have to get across the sense that your problem is really a problem."

The proposal also included two videos — one showing the club's team-building process and the other showing the brainstorming process behind the project. (To watch the videos, see below.)

Ding described making the videos as "definitely a highlight, with everybody running around with the camera, shooting everything since we had no idea what we would need."

The road from here

The home page of the Inventors Club's Belize Project blog. Gargoyle screenshot (click for blog)

Club members will work on their project through May. By mid-January, they will send blueprints to Belize, where interns will conduct on-site testing.

"In mid-June, Lemelson-MIT [wants us to fly] out to Boston where we will be presenting our projects at EurekaFest and hopefully see some other cool projects," said Ding.

For his part, Smith has enjoyed mentoring the students.

"It has been a great emotional boost to work with bright young people with fresh eyes and fresh hope picking up the challenge to address a substantive problem," he said. "This is the first time I've been involved in a project specifically designed to 'invent' something, so I can only guess what the long-term impacts will be. Certainly any effort to reach out across cultures to address an important problem is an invaluable experience for any person of substance. From that perspective, the project can only be viewed as a success." 

For Allen, the InvenTeams experience has already paid off in many ways.

"In the past year, I feel like I have grown as a person as Inventors Club has grown," she said. "It has been a maturing process for me, and I have already learned a lot from it all."

Among other things, she's discovered that modest beginnings are no indication of just how big an endeavor can become.

"About three students initially responded to Mr. Bergandine's e-mail concerning the grant, and now we have one of the biggest teams among the other Lemelson-MIT Inventeams," Allen said. "I had no idea what to expect when I came to the first meeting, but even with no initial expectations, I am still surprised at what we were able to accomplish.

"After all the effort the team and I have put into this, I am elated that we got this far, but really the work has only begun."

2009-10 LEMELSON-MIT INVENTEAMS GRANT RECIPIENTS

EAST

• Commack High School (Commack, N.Y.)
  Standby-power usage reduction device
• Staten Island Technical High School (Staten Island, N.Y.)
  Comfort control wheelchair seating
• Washington County Technical High School (Hagerstown, Md.)
  Temperature-sensitive, color-changing roof to combat global warming

CENTRAL

• Omaha Benson High School Magnet (Omaha, Neb.)
  Outdoor, self-sustaining, solar powered hydroponic gardening system
• Science Museum of Minnesota (Saint Paul, Minn.)
  Portable watercraft transfer device for people with disabilities
• University Laboratory High School (Urbana, Ill.)
  Effluent removal apparatus for sustainable aquaculture

SOUTH

• Columbus High School (Columbus, Ga.)
  Portable, inexpensive device to predict high-probability conditions for lightning strikes
• Cypress Bay High School (Weston, Fla.)
  Portable, human-powered, UV water filtration device
• Greenbrier West High School (Charmco, W.Va.)
  Wetland assessment system for multi-spectral photography, moisture sensing and data retrieval
• Hillside New Technical High School (Durham, N.C.)
  Residential green roofing system for sloped surfaces
• Hopewell High School (Hopewell, Va.)
  Ergonomic, interactive student desk
• Oak Ridge High School (Oak Ridge, Tenn.)
  Micro-scale hydroelectric water purifier

WEST

• Cesar Chavez High School (Laveen, Ariz.)
  Motorized physical therapy chair to reduce muscular atrophy
• Trevor Browne High School (Phoenix, Ariz.)
  Simple, human-powered drill tiller
• Woodrow Wilson Classical High School (Long Beach, Calif.)
  Air resistance and energy conversion system to increase energy efficiency of trains

Source: InvenTeams press release

Inventors Club Videos: Brainstorming and Team Building