Three 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 6 in Dearborn, Michigan at The Henry Ford.  

Laura Diaz Ossa and Kabir Juneja from Sope Creek Elementary, inventors of The Clean-O-Matic Birdbath, won First Place for Fifth Grade as well as Animal Care and Pets Award and a Patent Application Award. The invention uses a simple drain system to make cleaning birdbaths much easier.  

Liya Damij and Sara Zafaneli from Atlanta International School, inventors of Oral Detect, also won a Patent Application Award. Oral Detect is a toothbrush featuring biosensor detectors that detect bacterial colonies in the mouth.  

And Bhavya Alapati, from the Innovation Academy, took home the 11th Grade 2nd Place Award for SpectroStroke, a minimized spectrophotometer that allows for accurate one-step measurements to be completed by patients to predict diseases like stroke that currently have no methods of prediction.  

“Our students are so amazingly creative, so it’s no surprise that they did so well at U.S. Nationals,” said Danyelle Larkin, director of the K-12 InVenture Prize program. “Team Clean-O-Matic Birdbath had such a cool invention and did so well, especially for their first time in the competition. We are so proud of all of our Georgia student competitors, who brought their amazing optimism and inventive spirit to U.S. Nationals, proudly representing their home state of Georgia.”  

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. They also had the opportunity to pitch their inventions to Shark Tank casting agents and participate in a youth panel discussion. 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 competition, please visit https://k12inventure.gatech.edu.  

—Randy Trammell, CEISMC Communications