News

Project Invent Team Wins Seed Funding!

By Project Invent mentors Annette Lesak, Mary Catherine Coleman and Sarah Beebe
Parker is proud to announce that our first-ever Project Invent team, Team Vita Voca, was awarded $600 in seed funding at Project Invent’s May Demo Day competition! Parker’s team was supposed to attend the Demo Day in New York City at the end of April, but the event moved online due to COVID-19.
 
Check out the video of Demo Day here (jump forward to watch the team’s pitch; jump to watch the awards ceremony and see Team Vita Voca receive the $600 award to continue their work on the invention).
 
Project Invent is a national nonprofit 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 community partners to use design thinking to solve a problem for their particular partner, engineer and code a physical technology product to address that problem, and pitch their invention to a team of entrepreneurs, designers and investors.
 
This year, Team Vita Voca developed an easy-to-use emergency response kit for severely food-allergic young adults. Our team of students worked hard all year to develop empathy for our partner (junior Grayson Schementi), design something that would be useful and tackle building the kit using Arduino microcontrollers. With the money the team secured with this award, they will be able to continue the iteration process, further refining their device.
 
Massive shout-out to the incredible students who made it all happen:
Talia Albert ’22
Alicia Berger ’22
Sofia Brown ’22
Ruby Radis ’22
Cas Spencer ’22
Savanna Maness ’23
Payton Pitts ’23
Yazmin Velazquez ’23
Krystal Xu ’23
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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.