Project Invent Team Wins $500 Moonshot Award

I’m so proud to announce that this year’s Project Invent team was awarded the Moonshot Award and $500 in funding at Project Invent’s Demo Day in San Diego this past weekend. 

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 each work with a community partner using 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 the course of this school year, Parker team BioHack has been working with community partner Shelly Loose to build a motorized glove that aids in hand mobility. Their invention aims to help people with quadriplegia as well as those that have lost hand functionality due to a stroke, arthritis or cerebral palsy. Our team of students worked hard all school year to develop empathy for Shelly, design something that would be truly useful, then tackle building the glove using 3D printing and an Arduino microcontroller.

At the Demo Day event, 10 teams presented their inventions to a panel of biotech professionals in the San Diego area, and four teams earned awards and funding. The Moonshot Award, a “$500 award presented to the team that identified a notably novel or impactful idea,” went to team BioHack.

Check out the video of their incredible presentation at Demo Day here!
Click here to see photos from the trip!

Massive shout-out to the incredible students who made it all happen: seniors Owen Stepan and Malcolm Laris-Djokovic, junior Suhani Aggarwal and sophomores Ellis Brown and Zarin Mehta.