The Lemelson-MIT Program, located within the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been celebrating outstanding inventors and inspiring young people to pursue creative lives and careers for more than twenty years.  Its Lemelson-MIT Junior Varsity (JV) InvenTeams™ are designed to help students in grades 7-10 hone their hands-on skills and enrich their STEM education through invention-based design activities.

Winners of the high school InvenTeams contest have been invited to the White House. See this Fox 5 broadcast with two 2014 winners from Massachusetts.

Eight JV InvenTeam activity guides are now available free of charge in the resources section of the Lemelson-MIT website. Invention kits of materials and tools that go along with the activities in each digital guide will soon be available online at a cost. Also check out the HowToons graphical guides to visual communicati0ns and how to sketch ideas and draw prototypes for patent applications.

Interested in encouraging your students’ inventiveness?

Lemelson-MIT will be hosting two professional development workshops for middle and high school educators this summer at the University of California, Irvine from July 12-14 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from July 24-26. The three-day workshops will develop educators’ capacity to help kids learn to think and act as an inventor while developing a solution to a real-world problem. The workshop includes strategies for the effective use of JV InvenTeam activity guides.

Register and learn more at lemelson.mit.edu/events. Contact Gayle Golding at ggolding@mit.edu for questions or by phone at 617-253-3410.

Filed under: For Teachers, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, K-12 Outreach Programs, Special Features, Web Resources

Tags: Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Internet Resources, invention, MIT Lemelson, Professional Development, Programs for Teachers, Resources for Teachers, student inventors, Teacher Training, Web Resources