Two teams of student inventors from Georgia Tech’s K-12 InVenture Prize State Finals took home top honors at the Raytheon Technologies Invention Convention U.S. Nationals Award Ceremony on June 7 in Dearborn, Michigan at the Henry Ford.  

Nathan McKee and William Tyler from Kennesaw Mountain High School, creators of The Corder, won First Place for 11th Grade as well as Best In-Person Presentation. The Corder is a guitar-like instrument that makes playing easy by automating chord changes.  

Nellie Klodner and Anna Borsh from Panter Elementary won The Inclusion Award for Grocery Eyes, their app that makes shopping for food easier for sight-impaired people. 

“Our students created some amazing inventions, so it’s no surprise that they were singled out for honors on the national stage,” said Danyelle Larkin, director of the K-12 InVenture Prize program. “The Corder team has been working for years on their prototype and keep returning to the competition with a better product. That’s how this process works, through hard work, ingenuity and repeatedly reworking and rethinking how to make the invention work more efficiently,” she said. “Grocery Eyes is also such a cool invention too, an app that uses GPS to guide sight-impaired people though the grocery store ... and it was developed by elementary school students! It’s a great example illustrating how empathy is at the core of this process. It all starts with the question: What problem do you want to solve?” 

At this year’s Invention Convention U.S. Nationals, competing student inventors had the chance to engage with representatives from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, México Inventa inventors, as well the opportunity to pitch their inventions to Shark Tank casting agents, and participate in a GIS data visualization workshop. An affiliate of Invention Convention Worldwide, K-12 InVenture Prize reserves a number of spots to invite select student teams from State Finals to represent Georgia at the U.S. Nationals competition each year.  

The K-12 InVenture Prize, based in the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), challenges kindergarten through high school students to identify real-world problems and design novel solutions through analysis, creativity, and the engineering design process. 

For more information on the K-12 InVenture Prize curriculum and competition, please visit k12inventure.gatech.edu or www.k12inventure.org. 

—Randy Trammell, CEISMC Communications