Crossroads News
Students Win Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam™ Grant
Team will use funds to develop water conservation tool.
A team of eight Upper School students has been awarded a prestigious Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam™ Grant. The team invented a household water meter attachment that helps consumers monitor their water consumption, and will use the grant funds to develop a prototype. Crossroads is one of just 14 high schools to receive a Lemelson-MIT Program grant this year as part of the 2015-2016 InvenTeam initiative to inspire young people to solve real-world problems through invention.
The Crossroads team comprises 11th-graders Alex Frye, Emma Blue Kirby and Sarah Saltzman and 12th-graders Andrea De Oliveira, Alex Groenendaal-Jones, August Gross, Alex Pantuck and Jackson Stogel.
The students were aided in their research and application process by math teacher Kelly Castaneda and science teachers Grace Hayek and Paul Way. After students determined to tackle California’s devastating drought, “we invited members of Santa Monica's Office of Sustainability and the Environment to have an informal discussion about the drought and where the real problems lie,” Castaneda said. “During this discussion, we realized that consumers had no good way of knowing how much water they used—that there was no instant way to see the impact of their water conservation efforts … So we decided to invent a solution that would address this issue.”
The students developed a meter that increases consumer awareness of their water usage and detects leaks, allowing users to more effectively monitor and reduce water consumption. The device clamps onto the water meter and transfers an image of the meter face over the user’s local Wi-Fi network to a server, which processes the image and supplies consumption data to the user via a mobile application. The current prototype costs approximately $30 to build. The team will spend the next seven months developing their invention and will travel to EurekaFest at MIT in June 2016 to share their prototype with other young inventors.
