By Team Advisor and Upper School Computer Science Teacher Brianna Ifft
Parker’s Project Invent team traveled to California recently to present the invention they’ve been working on for the entirety of the school year.
Project Invent is a national non-profit organization that, “empowers students with the 21st century skills to succeed individually and impact globally. Our goal is to create a generation of fearless problem solvers.” Student teams across the country work with a community partner to use design thinking to solve a problem for that partner, engineer and code a physical technology product to address that problem, and pitch their invention to a team of entrepreneurs, designers and investors.
During this school year, Parker team Calm Quest has been working with their community partner to build a set of connected electronic wristbands. Their community partner was diagnosed with ALS about a year ago, and they built these wristbands to help her stay connected to loved ones as she goes through doctors appointments and hard days while dealing with this chronic illness. Their invention aims to help folks with any chronic condition, as well as to help anyone struggling with loneliness. Our team of students worked so hard all school year to develop empathy for their community partner, design something that would be truly useful and then tackled building the wristbands using 3D printing and an Arduino microcontroller.
Check out the video of their incredible presentation at Demo Day here!
Massive shout-out to Thewfic Anwar ’24 and Riya Jain ’24 who made it all happen!
Francis W. Parker School educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community.