Greenbrier East High School engineering students head to EurekaFest! at MIT

Jessica Farrish
·2 min read

FAIRLEA, WV (WVNS) — Life comes with good times, but it also has its share of challenges.

The good news is that there are problem solvers, like the engineering students of Greenbrier East High School’s Lemelson-MIT Invention Education Capstone Curriculum Course.

The GEHS class is one of just three courses the elite research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts piloted several years ago in American schools, according to Kevin Warfield, engineering instructor at GEHS.

Students of the course identify a problem and then use engineering to solve it.

“Invention education, it’s kind of like a choose your own adventure book,” Mr. Warfield said on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, as engineering students gathered at the West Virginia State Fairgrounds near Lewisburg to display their projects. “The kids find a problem to solve and they develop a solution, and I don’t know what I’ll be teaching some days. The students will come in, and they’ll say, ‘Well, we need to learn how to do this.'”

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Two of the teams will head to Cambridge to present their projects later this school year during EurekaFest! at MIT.

One of those teams created a thermal imaging camera to help free the hands of firefighters as they enter burning buildings.

“We have members in our teams that parents are firefighters, and we just ran out of ideas and got people’s professions, around, to see how we could help,” said Braedon Spangler, a junior who helped design the project.

The second team will present a wheelchair which can change elevations at EurekaFest!

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“With regular wheelchairs, you’re not able to adjust heights, you know, at certain levels, different desks and tables and things, they’re just hard to reach, and this is supposed to help with that,” explained team member Nathaniel Smith, a senior who said he had presented at a similar convention at MIT as an underclassmen.

Mr. Warfield said the two teams attending the event this year will be the third and fourth teams from Greenbrier East High to present at MIT.

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