This past June, CCDs InvenTeam travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts to present at the Lemelson-MIT Foundation’s EurekaFest. We scheduled a week-long trip around the three-day EurekaFest experience so that our team could explore Boston and tour colleges in the area. We spent the first part of the trip off of the MIT campus. During first few days, we practiced our presentation and prepared to speak about our bicycle safety product, IllumiLane. On our first day, we visited attractions such as the MIT Museum and we took a guided tour of the Freedom Trail. The next day, the P&G Gillette facility was kind enough to take our team on a tour of their building where we learned valuable information about production, marketing, and invention. After the tour, we were off to MIT where we checked into our dorms, had dinner, and a few members of our team were interviewed by part of the Lemelson-MIT Foundation’s research team. The following day was extremely busy with EurekaFest preparation. We were able to meet members of other InvenTeams and bond over our love of invention and desire to help others. It was an incredible experience to be in a room filled with high schoolers that were extremely diverse, but came together over the shared passion to solve problems in their communities.

Then it was finally EurekaFest – the day our team had been working towards for an entire year. The morning was filled with formal presentations. We presented in an auditorium in front of other teams, parents, supporters, and a livestream that many Country Day community members were kind enough to watch. Our team is still very proud of how we presented. It was incredibly powerful and rewarding to be able to showcase the product we had poured so many hours into. After watching the other groups present, which was very impressive and interesting, we had a quick lunch and began setting up our booth. The afternoon was an open, convention-type, showcase where each InvenTeam as well as Cambridge School Science Fair winners had a booth with their product and different forms of media. For hours, our team explained and demonstrated IllumiLane to curious educators, students, and other attendees. Though it was an unbelievable experience that our entire team will value for a lifetime, we were extremely worn out by the end of EurekaFest.

The long day culminated in a dinner with all of the InvenTeams as well as Lemelson-MIT fellows, educators, and other members of the MIT community. Directly following this dinner, the Lemelson-MIT Foundation hosted an awards ceremony. To our absolute surprise, the CCDS InvenTeam won the Excellence in Communications Award! We were very happy with this recognition for the hard work that our communications team performed, but there was an even bigger surprise in store for us. It turned out that a member of Beaver Works, an educational collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory and MIT School of Engineering, attends EurekaFest every year with the goal of identifying one team to receive the Golden Beaver Award. This award is the largest honor to be given for an InvenTeam at EurekaFest and recognizes excellence in technical achievement. The Cincinnati Country Day School InvenTeam was announced as the 2024 winner of the Golden Beaver Award! There could not have been a better end to this segment of our invention process. While EurekaFest is now over, we will continue to work on IllumiLane with a new level of confidence and motivation.

The next day, we checked out of our MIT dorms and headed off campus with our Golden Beaver trophy in hand. That morning, we had the incredible experience of touring the Koch Institute where we learned about the cancer research performed there. That evening and the next morning, the team took various college tours and de-stressed with many card games and ice cream cones. We landed in Cincinnati an entirely different team. The tightly knit team now has a new view of invention, motivation to move forward with our progress, and pride in what we had accomplished. EurekaFest was an absolutely incredible experience that I, personally, will cherish and remember forever. None of our team expected that we would accomplish as much as we were able to, nor did we anticipate everything we learned from it. Stay tuned for more updates on IllumiLane as we pick back up!