Hundreds of high school inventors will fill the Museum of Science Saturday for the annual design challenge. Roughly 30 groups will create their own wind turbine that can lift a metal garbage can 3 stories high, dropping it simultaneously in a “Big Bang.”
CAMBRIDGE. Teens from California enlightened an MIT audience Thursday on the best way to get coconuts from trees in India, Indonesia and the Philippines.
And so it goes at MIT’s “EurekaFest,” the annual event that brings together inventors young and old for a four-day “celebration of the inventive spirit.”
“It’s exciting to see how we as high school students can make an impact,” said 16-year-old Melissa Jawaharlal, part of a 12-person team from Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., which demonstrated its robotic coconut-tree climbing device.
The apparatus is still in production, but some day it may help in the harvest half a world away.
“That’s the rewarding part,” said team member Philip Jia, 17.
The event’s centerpiece is the annual $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, awarded Wednesday to Dr. Joseph M. Simone, a University of North Carolina chemistry professor, for advancements made in the environmentally friendly production of high-performance plastics.
But Thursday offered a chance for future Dr. Simones to take the stage, touting inventions they’ve devoted months, or in some cases, years to creating.
“Oohs” and “aahs” greeted the rollout of Saint Thomas Academy’s lime green electric motorcycle, complete with crush zones the Minnesota inventors might find perfectly suited for busy Boston streets.