District 5 Student Inventors Work on Self-Guided Wheelchair Proposal

Submitted by Lexington-Richland District Five.

Sean Kruzner’s summer has been anything but ordinary. As a member of Lexington-Richland School District Five’s InvenTeam his days away from classes has been filled with tinkering – adjusting the wires of an electronically motioned hand, testing physics on a homemade hovercraft, and perhaps most importantly poring over a self-guided wheelchair proposal that’s a finalist for a national grant. 

These are just a few of the projects Kruzner and others in the group worked on during a banner first year for the Center for Advanced Technical Studies organization. District Five’s InvenTeam advisor Dr. Martin Cwiakala was recently named a recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Excite Award for his group’s proposal to create a self-guided wheelchair. As an award recipient, they are finalists for a $10,000 national grant. 

In June, the InvenTeam received a service learning award at the 2013 Education and Business Summit that included $100 for future service learning projects. The District Five InvenTeam won first place in team competition in the Region II USC Science Fair this past school year and participated in the Intel Science and Engineering International Fair with 1700 students from 70 different countries. 

“So far, these kids have come up with many successful projects like the self-guided wheelchair, the bent arm trebuchet and a kitty litter fan that uses ultraviolet light to kill odor-causing bacteria,” Cwiakala said. “I am not at all surprised with their success. All of these projects they designed with little guidance from me.” 

The group will begin recruiting new members once school starts. Kruzner, a student at Chapin High, said students who join the group will learn a lot about how to take an invention from idea to actual project. Some of the students have pursued patents, while others have just enjoyed the process of putting ideas into action. 

“I like inventing because I enjoy figuring out how to make things work and do what they’re supposed to,” Kruzner said during an interview this summer. “InvenTeam was just like an outlet to help us get our projects further along than we could have by ourselves.” 

Cwiakala added, “People want inventions they can relate to and actually use in everyday life. I think everyone can invent things. All they have to do is identify a problem and use it as an opportunity to invent something to solve that problem. People are creative; they just need to recognize how creative they are.”