“Tiny Mic: Big Designs,” the innovative digital video series produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) Education in partnership with Georgia Tech’s K-12 InVenture Prize, is now officially an Emmy-nominated series.  

“Tiny Mic: Big Designs” was nominated for a Southeast Emmy Award in the category of Children/Youth Teen Short Form Content. Winners will be announced June 14.  

In the series, GPB Education producer and host Ashley Mengwasser talks to K-12 student inventors from all over Georgia about their inspiration and design process. In humorous, short interviews, the series highlights both the playfulness of inventing and the serious challenges these inventions seek to address. Mengwasser, a nine-time Emmy Award-winning host, writer and executive producer with fifteen years' experience in television, was the creative visionary behind Tiny Mic: Big Designs.  

“Hosting this series and interviewing K-12 inventors was a career dream come true,” Mengwasser said. “In my original vision, we were simply giving these students a platform for their ideas. That we ultimately made a creatively distinguished media product that is at least Emmy-nomination worthy is electrifying! Can you patent a feeling? If only!”  

“The production quality created by Ashley and the GPB Education team speaks for itself,” said Roxanne Moore, principal research engineer and longtime advocate for invention education. “Being nominated for an Emmy Award is the icing on the cake. This series, with its humor and at times raw honesty is a step in bringing more inventors to the table by dispelling the myth that inventing requires a lightbulb moment.” 

“Ashley and the team were able to capture so many memorable moments with our students and share their stories in a fun, funny, engaging way. Our students are, of course, the stars of this project, and they delivered with personality, wit and genius ideas that are relevant to their worlds. It’s kind of a magical project, honestly,” said Danyelle Larkin, director of the K-12 InVenture Prize competition.  

All of the featured students were participants in the K-12 InVenture Prize program offered at their local schools. 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.  

“The brilliant K-12 InVenture Prize students and teachers featured in our series speak for themselves. That’s the only thing I wanted. This honor is for them,” Mengwasser said.  

Watch all 32 episodes: https://www.gpb.org/education/tiny-mic.

For more information on the K-12 InVenture Prize curriculum and competition, and to join us for 2026, please visit https://k12inventure.gatech.edu.  

—Randy Trammell, CEISMC Communications