On Friday, May 25, 2018, eighth-grade students in Mrs. Sarah Bocian’s honors science classes participated in “The Invention Convention,” a public display of their engineering inventions and a culmination of a year’s worth of research, building and testing. The event, held in Commons C at Abington Junior High School, provided an opportunity for students to not only showcase their final products, but to also talk with visitors about their processes – what common problem they were trying to solve, how they came up with their ideas, and ultimately, how they created their invention.
Many of the projects centered around students’ everyday lives and common household tasks or obstacles, with inventions ranging from table-cleaning robots, to special holders for hands to grip slippery bars of soap. With only a few initial class periods set aside for brainstorming ideas as a group, the students then worked on the majority of their projects at home over the past few months.
In the end, The Invention Convention was a great lesson in the four Cs of 21st century skillsets: collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and communication. Bocian, who designed this project to go beyond a typical science fair, explained how students not only had to learn how to problem solve — as they often encountered faults in their initial designs — but the end-result of needing to present their findings to parents and other attendees of the convention required them to finesse their public speaking and presentation skills. Now, Bocian is looking forward to what inventions her students will come up with next school year.