MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — They
spent the last few months brainstorming, collaborating and implementing their
ideas, so the 630-plus young Midstate inventors were ready to burst when they
crammed into MTSU’s Student Union Thursday, Feb. 23, for the 25th annual Invention
Convention.
“They
are thoroughly enjoying this day. They look forward to it every year,”
said Diane Vantrease, the “learning leader” at Coles Ferry Elementary
School in Lebanon, Tennessee, as several excited students scurried past,
relieved that their inventions had passed the judges’ inspections and ready to
check out other students’ ideas around the room.
“By
Christmas break, they have to at least have the name of their invention and the
general idea, and when we come back to school the first of January, we jump
headfirst in and are working every class period until this past week.”
Asked
to invent games and items to "make life easier," the fourth-, fifth-
and sixth-graders responded with more than 340 unique gadgets, contraptions and
devices for this year’s event. Elementary education professor Tracey
Huddleston established MTSU’s Invention Convention in 1993 in tribute to
her mother, True Radcliff, a
longtime fifth-grade teacher who conducted "Invention
Convention"-type events at her school.
The
Invention Convention participants are public- and private-school students in Coffee,
Davidson, DeKalb, Franklin, Grundy, Rutherford, Sumner, Warren, Wilson and
Williamson counties. More than 110 received ribbons or trophies for their 2017
creations, and several of those winners are headed next to the national
Invention Convention set for June in Washington, D.C.
By
comparison, Huddleston recalled, the inaugural Invention Convention in 1993 at
MTSU welcomed 56 young inventors and their 42 inventions to the James Union
Building, enjoying plenty of presentation space in a cordoned-off half of the
cavernous Tennessee Room.
You can see a list of the 2017 MTSU Invention Convention
winners at http://ow.ly/5opF309kVjz. This year’s convention program, which includes the names of
all the young inventors, is at http://ow.ly/BQ55309l2kP.
State Farm Insurance is the longtime local sponsor of MTSU’s annual
Invention Convention.
Each Invention Convention
also features a guest speaker who focuses on encouraging the youngsters to
embrace their creativity and their imaginations to solve problems. Guests over
the years have included astronauts, artists, athletes, musicians, scientists,
historians and more; the 2017 guests were a trio of musicians — Victoria and Stephen Carey and Ian
Christian — who explained the importance of collaboration when bringing
inventions alive. The three cited examples of songs that need the expertise of
many people to reach an audience.
“The avenues of a song are very different, but they all
come together in one way or another, whether you’re writing it and recording it
and producing it or performing it on tour or hearing it on the radio,” Stephen
Carey explained after the trio danced and sang with the youngsters to the
strains of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Up,” George Strait’s “Check Yes or No” and
their own wedding song, “Forever All Mine.”
“It’s very exciting how these inventions, these songs
that you create with other people, become all these different things. It’s an
exciting process from the beginning to wherever they end up, just like your
inventions.”
Each convention also showcases an everyday object and
explains its history as an invention, such as a tape measure, golf ball, USB
charger, Frisbee, dice and pair of sunglasses; this year conventioneers learned
about headphones, invented in 1910 to help naval radio operators hear better,
and received a tiny pair of customized “Invention Convention 2017” earbuds to
take home.
Like inventor Nathaniel Baldwin working at his kitchen
table on that first pair of headphones, Huddleston urged each of the
conventioneers to continue inventing.
“Remember: You’ve created something today that wasn’t
here before. Regardless of who walks away with a special award, all of you are
walking away with an invention, and I want you to keep inventing,” she said as
the students, teachers and parents celebrated.
“Come back here next year, and the next year. I want you
to believe in yourself. That’s part of the collaboration — if we didn’t have
other people to believe in us, where would we be? Keep inventing, keep thinking,
keep problem-solving. There are tons of problems that need to be solved.”
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