The engineering students are swinging hammers once again.

JC Lewis’s engineering and Think-Tank students have split into four groups to create inventions for the Pennsylvania Invention Convention, which is hosted every year and is open to grades K-12.

The Pennsylvania Invention Convention is an annual event with three levels: Elementary: K-4, Middle: 5-8 and High: 9-12.

“We compete within our region, and the highest scoring teams move onto the state competition, and from there, the winner of the state final is invited to a national competition,” Lewis said.

Each team is scored by a three-part rubric; the invention process, which is the concept of anything that anyone invents, identifies the problem ideating designing, building and testing or refining.

The other two parts of the rubric look at the impact of the invention, or how it will affect the world, and the invention communication, such as the invention log book and overall presentation to the judges.

One team, named “Inspectria” placed third in the state competition, meaning that they will proceed to nationals.
“At first I was kind of upset, but they said our scoring was very close to second place, so I’m happy now,”Pennington-Lindley said.

Freshmen Scarlett Pennington-Lindley and Pramit Patel created Inspectria with one goal in mind: detecting positive and negative bacteria.

“At first I was kind of upset, but they said our scoring was very close to second place, so I’m happy now,” Pennington-Lindley said. “Inspectria detects bacteria on surfaces, and we are working on getting it to detect the difference between gram-negative bacteria and gram-positive bacteria.”

Gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria are two subtypes of bacteria that are characterized by different cell walls.
“They actually react differently to light, which is what would help differentiate them,” Pennington-Lindley said.