Let the Mission Franklini team tell you a story. It starts like this: Twenty years ago, researcher Robbin Thorp observed that two Oregon bumblebee species were disappearing at alarming rates. One of those species was Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini). With only outdated tools and methods at his disposal, Thorp struggled to identify and prove the cause their decline, until, in 2006, Robbin Thorp saw his last Franklin’s Bumblebee. Dr. Thorp is not alone. More than half of

The five-person team from George Fox University that makes up SitAct knows you might be slumping in front of your laptop while reading this blog post. That’s why their invention, a pad that you sit on while working that will measure and analyze your posture, sending messages on screen with suggestions for improvement. The target market? The millions of potential customers who sit in front of a screen for far too many hours. We caught up with SitAct before they hit the road to

When’s the last time you ordered up some hydrogen? The team behind Turner Motor Company did just that in advance of this week’s InventOR finals. But despite the potential red flags that might have sent up for school administrators, it was all in service of a noble goal. “Turner Motor Company seeks to solve the biggest problem of the 21st century: climate change,” says team lead Blake Turner. “We must take decisive action as a global community by the end of the century, or the

OrbitOWLS and Lit might have been the last two teams to join the InventOR Collegiate Challenge field for 2018, but they have one possible advantage in Friday’s final competition: home court. The two were the top winners of the fourth annual Catalyze Klamath Falls Challenge held on May 17. (You can read all about Catalyze and its innovative competitors here.) Now they advance to the statewide stage, which for the first time is happening at Oregon Institute of Technology, aka O

What has its roots in in the personal transformations of its team members, the #metoo movement, the rash of school shootings, and research on suicide? The innovation from Eastern Oregon University known as Kula Dudes. “Research indicates that suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men and that 25 percent of the entire population of men in the U.S. have zero close friends in which to confide,” says Kula Dudes faculty team member Spencer Harber. Those kinds of uncomforta

They’re known as the SIPpers, six first-year undergraduate students at Oregon State University who are all members of that school’s Inventors Enterprise Club. The team, a mix of engineering and business students, was moved by problems with water quality as far flung as Flint, Michigan, and as close to home as Portland Public Schools. “We’re aiming to make a simple, inexpensive device for people to use to test their water regularly at home,” says John McCarthy, an industrial e

Lyfe Tech wants to help parents, students, and teachers feel better about being in school. The growing anxiety around school shootings is a problem worth solving, and the Lyfe (it stands for Leave Yesterday's Fears Extinct) is using technology to do it. We caught up with Alexis Figueroa-Gutierrez to learn more about the concept and how the prototype is coming. 1. Sadly, new school shootings have continued to dominate the headlines since Lyfe Tech joined the InventOR competiti

Traveling with an international group, Youth With a Mission, Adam Babuka, spent close to a decade living out of a backpack in remote reaches of more than 30 countries from Uganda to Afghanistan, China to Russia. During that time he was doing community development work serving local communities with medical supplies and food distribution and other related programs. He became frustrated by the lack of versatile backpacking equipment—the range of tools he needed to set up a safe

The School Marm Treats team is stacked with family members with Michelle Russell, education faculty at Eastern Oregon University, joining forces with her student sons Kevin Russell (who serves as CFO and is a graduating senior at EOU with a history major) and Kurtis Russell (who leads marketing and is studying film in Portland). She’s also drafted her 11-year-old twin daughters, Ava and Grace, to be sous chefs. e inspiration for the School Marm Treats name came from a photo t

The finals are fast approaching and student teams are busily finishing up their prototypes—while simultaneously navigating year-end finals and other demands on their time. But for three days in May teams met in Portland for a workshop to better prepare them for the June 29 finals. Lab 2 Market included sessions on the golden rules of presentations, developing an elevator pitch, understanding the lifecycle of inventions and applying sustainability to the invention process, mar

They boast the biggest team in this year’s InventOR Collegiate Challenge. The nine students behind Halo Holds are members of the Oregon State University Sports Engineering Club and they’ve come up with a new system for rock climbing gyms designed to make better use of limited space and help new climbers succeed in the sport. Halo Holds marries technology and sport to create a flexible system that communicates via Bluetooth for control using an Android-compatible mobile device

Ever wonder what it takes to make it into the InventOR competition? Initial competition rounds took place earlier this year at participating schools from OregonTech in the south to the University of Portland in the north and many other points in between. The road to InventOR is paved with two key ingredients: a good idea and a good pitch. InventOR asks students to create inventions to solve the problems they see in their communities. The University of Oregon students behind t

GrowCube, a team of four students from George Fox University, are determined to improve STEM education with their soil-free plant-growing test station designed for use in schools. We caught up with one of the team members, mechanical engineering student Jonmichael Weaver, to find out how the run-up to InventOR (#meetmeinklamath) is going. 1. What’s been the biggest change in your invention since you started working on the prototype? Jonmichael Weaver: The biggest change in o

We’ve all been there. Back-to-back meetings or classes. No time to stop and the stomach is growling. Sunlight Bites wants to be there for you with a vending machine — but not just any vending machine, one with healthy, plant-based options. “If we want a quick snack, it needs to be more nutrient dense,” says Lora Schmueker, a part-time vegan chef and Portland Community College student who is developing Sunlight Bites with her partner, Noemy Orozoco. Lora, Noemy, and Sunlight B