Congratulations to Mrs. Kroll’s 10 sixth-grade students who competed in the WQED Invention Challenge, including the winning team of Bernadette Donovan, Leah Farster, Abigail Haines, Cassie Majernik, and Nora Thomas.

“I wasn’t expecting to win,” Abigail said. “When they called the top three teams up, I was definitely surprised. I feel like the bigger surprise was when they announced that we tied for first place.”

“It feels good because there were a lot of kids who were in higher grades there, and we also spent a lot of time during our Personalized Learning time to work on this and make it the best that we could,” Nora added.

Students created invention prototypes and videos as a part of the competition. Deer Lakes students were competing against schools from across Western Pennsylvania.

The Bristle Beauty team 3-D printed a stand and handle with interchangeable brush heads. Their invention was a solution to simplify packing brushes for travel. They also completed 2 STEM challenges with students from other schools in the Pittsburgh area and met with local engineers and engineering students.

“We started with the hairbrush idea and kept changing different concepts,” Cassie said. “We would identify reasons why one idea might not work, but we kept working until we found a solution that could fit several hairbrushes.”

The group was composed of friends, making the project easy to work on.

“We’re friends, we have classes together, and we texted each other a lot about it,” Bernadette said. “It didn’t feel like extra work.”

“We were excited to get to do something together,” Leah added. “It would be fun to do again next year to improve what we already have or to do something different.”

The team agreed that their invention ideas for the future are “top secret.”

Great job everyone!