CCDS InvenTeam

Cincinnati Country Day School was awarded a Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) InvenTeam grant to create an invention geared towards improving road bike safety. Country Day is one of only eight high schools nationwide to be selected to have an InvenTeam for the 2023-24 school year.

InvenTeam members include Ayaan Arif `25, Alex Back `25, Donovan Gray `25, Kate Kranias `26, Lucia Murdoch `25, Kevin Pearson `25, and Jason Starodub `26.

Inspiration and Empowerment Through STEM, A Reflection on the InvenTeam Experience
By: Kate Kranias `26

As a sophomore girl with strong interests in STEM fields, I have found InvenTeams incredibly inspiring and empowering. I’ve learned a lot about teamwork, the invention process, and communication.

We started the process at the beginning of July and have worked about 400 hours since. We began entirely from scratch and spent the first month deciding which problem to tackle. It is a large and rather daunting task for a group of high school students to invent a solution for a problem they can identify within their community. At first, we were all a bit overwhelmed. Though the grant application and invention process must be student-led, our co-educators, Mrs. [Jamie] Back and Mrs. [Angela] Barber-Joiner, helped mitigate our stresses and guide us.

After we settled on a problem statement about road-biking safety, we had to write a grant application to send to LMIT. This was yet another daunting task, but at this point, we felt more confident in our ability to work together to accomplish such milestones. The grant involved pages of research, potential ideas, statements about our passion, and accounts of our meetings. We also included preliminary sketches of our two proposed solutions and team pictures.

The wait between submitting our grant application and hearing back from LMIT felt very long and heavy with anticipation. We finally heard back in October…and we got the grant! Hearing that all our hard work on the grant application paid off was amazing. The entire team had become close by this point, and there was no better group of people to share that excitement with. We knew the following seven months would be difficult, but we were eager to see what our invention statement could turn into.

Until the end of February, we had to focus on our upcoming Mid-Grant Technical Review: a time for us to share what we had been working on with our families, the Country Day community, and our  LMIT fellow. The Mid-Grant Technical Review was surreal. It was incredible to not only share something I had developed such passion for, but also watch my teammates showcase their strengths. One of the most meaningful and impactful moments of this journey thus far has been the moment of silence we took at the Mid-Grant Technical Review for Mr. Fred Carey – a member of the Class of 1980 and a long-time and much-beloved English teacher whose untimely death in a road-bike accident in 2014 helped inspire our invention .

Following the Mid-Grant Technical Review, it was one strong stride to the finish line. A highlight of the last few months has been attending a City Council meeting and meeting with the Department of Transportation of the City of Cincinnati. At the City Council meeting, our team was recognized for our efforts to improve bicyclists’ safety on the road.

At the time of writing, we are making last minute touches to our prototype and preparing our presentation for EurekaFest. The entire team, including myself, is so excited to travel to Boston to showcase our invention.