After-school inventors get funding
ACTON -- Decked out with tiny chain sprockets, copper-tone pins, and glinting wiring, the metallic canister on the glossy-black laboratory table at Acton-Boxborough Regional High School looks like some futuristic toy.
But students working on the device say their invention, which they refer to as a reusable fire-extinguishing grenade, might save lives someday. During a fire emergency, they said, firefighters could pull the pin on the canister and toss it into a burning room, where the grenade would expel a gas that would help suppress the flames.
The after-school group hopes to even patent the device.
"We think it will work," 10th-grader Alexandra Bisol said as the group of teenagers in T-shirts huddled around the contraption, fiddling with its gears.
The team's effort is sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT Program, which was established in 1994 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to recognize and promote inventors.
Acton-Boxborough was one of only 22 teams across the nation, known as "InvenTeams," to receive grants last fall to conceptualize, design, and create their own inventions.
A group from the Bromfield School in Harvard, which is creating a device designed to help people with memory impairment from afflictions such as Alzheimer's disease and brain injury, received a grant this year. Dubbed an "aPod," the device would deliver simple reminder messages to its user for such tasks as taking medication on time and completing household chores, like making sure doors are closed, according to Barbara Petroulis, one of the adult mentors for the Bromfield School team.
In an unprecedented step for the Lemelson-MIT program,
It's a model that directors of the program want to repeat in coming years, since its financial resources are limited, said Joshua Schuler, the InvenTeam officer for Lemelson-MIT. The InvenTeam program has swelled from 10 teams at its inception in 2004 to 22 this year, he said, but in order to flourish, it will need outside funding.
"If we want to grow, we can only do so with corporate partnerships," Schuler said. "I'd like to see many more InvenTeams."
The program helps students build confidence in their ability to tap latent creativity, Schuler said. But teachers and students at Acton-Boxborough said the team effort is also a lesson in the "real world" and the art of networking.
Acton-Boxborough 11th-grader Joe Keith said he approached a parts company to buy a gear for the grenade device but found it difficult to get a response. It wasn't until Don Davis, a software engineer at Cisco, stepped in and talked to the manager at the company that the team was able to acquire the mechanical part.
"I was involved in getting students used to the adminis-trivia," Davis said.
The team also got help from Concord-based SolidWorks Corp., which sells a three-dimensional design software that enabled the students to create a visual image of the grenade before making it.
The team had to be careful to work around the patents for other fire-extinguishing grenades, which already exist in two varieties, Bisol said. One is a foam ball that explodes, jetting fire-suppressing material around a burning room. The other is a device that absorbs fire into itself.
"The main difference is that ours is a reusable device," Bisol said. "The others are not."
The team recently performed a short test with its device. Eleventh-grader Joe Amato wound the sprockets on the device, and the canister hissed for a few seconds, letting out a sharp release of pressurized air.
Amato said the group will not be able to fully test the device with the fire-suppressing gas because of budget restrictions. Simulating a live fire would require local permitting and would be costly, he said.
Even so, local fire departments have been receptive to the invention, Bisol said. "So far, everyone has been for it," she said.
Boxborough Fire Chief Geoffrey Neagle said the device would have to pass numerous regulatory hurdles -- a process that could take as long as five years -- before fire departments would use it in their day-to-day operations. But he said he likes the idea behind the invention, which students floated to him as they began researching the project.
"There's a question of liability," he said. "It would have to be tested.
"I like the concept."
The teams of inventors will showcase their creations at the InvenTeams Odyssey to be held Tuesday through June 23 at MIT. 