Nolan’s Notes

Earlier this July, I was able to take part in the 2008 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Odyssey in Boston due to my involvement this year with Hillsboro High’s InvenTeam program. Here is a recap of our time there, along with a few pictures as well. Enjoy!

To summarize, MIT was a blast. In just the first day or two, we were able to tour the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, get an inside look at the rest of MIT (including their wind tunnel, which they turned on for us), as well as eat some good chowder at Legal Seafood.

The actual event itself was for my high school’s InvenTeam club, which was picked to create an invention of our choice with a few thousand dollars of grant money. Our invention this year was to create an autonomous industrial cleaning robot that would clean large areas such as a cafeteria or commons, saving the cleaning staff time and money. For our prototype, I designed the motor control circuit and the wireless control, which is the big remote thing I’m holding in one of the pictures. Also, I helped build the whole robot from scratch using our laser cutter at school to cut out plastic parts for the robot. Why isn’t it autonomous yet, you might ask? The real “brains” of the robot in being able to know where it’s at is a hard project, and we didn’t have time to complete it before our trip. My team member Lillian is working on perfecting the artificial intelligence for the robot and hopes to have it moving in a reliable graph pattern by the end of this year. Not an easy feat to do!

Anyways, back to the trip. One of the main parts of the Odyssey was a program called Invention to Venture, which was part of a national program for college students on bringing their invention ideas to an actual venture capital product. For our InvenTeams, the same group compressed the nuggets of their seminar into a 1-1/2 day workshop that we used to flesh out our business plan, develop a 30-second pitch, and present a timeline of our invention to venture process, including patenting, production, and selling. While I wish we were able to do the whole seminar, I still was able to “get my feet wet” in the principles of venture capital and plan to use it again later on in college and afterwards.

After the first day of the workshop, we exhibited our prototype invention for a continuous crowd at the Stata Center at MIT. I would have to say, a lot of people were impressed with our project, including some of the VIP’s that walked by. In setting up our robot beforehand, we were very glad that nothing drastic went wrong as that was something that jeopardized our project last year. I wish I had a video of the robot moving that I could show you, but I’m still working on getting that off our other camera. Maybe some other time.

Friday night (after the last day of Invention to Venture), we were treated to a full lobster dinner with all the trimmings, which was a blast and a great way to wind down! I met quite a few different people talking around the table that night, and although I might not see them again, there’s something cool about knowing that someone on the other side of the country is doing the same process of invention and design.

The last activity we did was a design challenge at the Boston Museum of Science Saturday morning. Knowing nothing of our activity when we showed up, we were split into 30 teams of 6-7 people and were challenged with creating a wind-powered device that could lift our team’s garbage can 30 feet up into the air, basically the whole 3-story height of the museum. Our supplies included various lengths of PVC pipe, heavy cardboard tubing, some foam core board, some cardboard, a metal axle, and a huge roll of duct tape! When our 4-hour engineering cram session came to a close, 5 of the 30 teams completed the mission successfully (one team did it in 32 seconds), and many more teams got it at least halfway, which our team almost did. At the end, they raised up all of the garbage cans and dropped them with a large crash as the finale, which was pretty cool (and loud)! I have a few pictures of this as well. It was a blast to do some rapid prototyping and start figuring out how to work in a team.

Luckily, we had a little bit of free time on Sunday so we took the opportunity to tour downtown Boston and the Charles River on repurposed army amphibious vehicles called “Duck Boats”. We saw quite a few sights on the trip, including the original inspiration for the Cheers T.V. show and the Boston State House. It made us wish we had some more time in Boston, and so we left the tour with heavy hearts and heavy eyelids…ready to finally head home to Portland.

So, there you have it, my trip to Boston in a nutshell! I seriously hope I have some similar trips in college, because this one was a blast. So long MIT, and maybe I’ll be able to visit again in the fall!