Last weekend, three Willow Springs High School students traveled to Kansas City with team leader Matt Knapp and sponsor Sabrina Lee to compete at Make48 on the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) campus in an invention competition against 6 other schools from across the state.
The students, Nolan Perkins, Maddie Poor, and Seth Wake, competing under the name “Innovation Hall Bears” spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday prototyping a brand-new invention in response to a prompt to “improve the stadium experience.” Throughout the forty-eight hour competition, the students created a physical prototype of their invention, mocked up a phone application, shot a promotional video, and compiled the necessary information to present a professional sales pitch to a panel of judges including a representative from Sporting Kansas City and the Project Lead the Way Program.
The students were chosen as representatives of the school’s new Career Technical Center, Innovation Hall. Each student represented a different part of the CTE programs being newly offered – Nolan Perkins from Bear Media, Maddie Poor from Business Entrepreneurship, and Seth Wake from Project Lead the Way Engineering.
Throughout the competition, the students worked with industry professionals to craft parts from industrial equipment that included CNC routers and milling machines, laser cutters, and other fabrication tools. According to a press release from the school on the students, “They worked tirelessly for as much as nineteen hours per day to perfect their product and pitch and the work paid off when they won the competition’s top prize and became state champions!” The team received a custom-made trophy crafted in the UMKC Maker Space and a $2,000 cash prize!
Their win cements their placement in the national competition to be held in November. Make48 is a televised innovation competition and the event was filmed for the first two episodes of their eight season. This fall, the episodes will air on Roku Channel in their This Old House program as well as on YouTube.
