Our workforce development team joined with PhD students, Lydia Colvin and Kolby Killion recently visited The Rio Grande Valley to run the Young Scholars Invent program. The Young Scholars Invent is a 1.5-day program designed to engage students in a multi-disciplined, multi-level, intense design experience that is focused on solving real-world needs provided by industry and agency partners. The structure of the program is to introduce students to various challenges, have them self-select teammates from other schools, engage in an active design process, build and test their design, and finally provide a presentation to “sell” their solution to a select set of judges.
This year, 26 students from 5 different high schools joined teams and selected issues written by PATHS-UP faculty and PhD students to solve. At the end of the competition, the students present their prototype/proof of concepts to a panel of judges. This year’s winning team was comprised of Ysaura Perez, Kendall Franke, Sophia Munoz, and Nadia Madoum- Their prototype used red infrared light to monitor glucose levels, in a pre-existing wearable device.
