Health & Safety Inventions Lead Students to National Competition

June 21, 2020 (Avon, CT) — Three students from Talcott Mountain Academy were recognized for multiple awards at the Connecticut Invention Convention (CIC) Virtual Awards Night held on June 14, 2020. Talcott eighth-grader Jasper Southam from Shelton, and seventh-grader Ariana Pourkavoos and sixth-grader Elias Starr, both from Avon, received the Connecticut Invention Convention’s Recognized Inventor Award and invitations to compete at the Invention Convention U.S. Nationals, which will take place online in June 2020.

An estimated one thousand students in grades K-12 compete in the CIC finals each year. More than 100,000 K-12 inventors from across the United States and elsewhere compete each year at local events to showcase their inventions at the Invention Convention U.S. Nationals on the floor of Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation alongside some of the most iconic inventions in American history. This year the event is being held virtually, and participation at the National event is by invitation only.

In addition to the CIC Inventor Award, Southam received the Life Sciences Award- Boehringer Ingelheim Cares Foundation Award, and he and Pourkavoos received the Connecticut Academy of Sciences and Engineering (CASE) Award.

To view the official press release from the Connecticut Invention Convention that includes the full list of student awards, click here.

The Winning Inventions

Jasper Southam, eighth-grader from Shelton who received first place for Applied Technology and Computer Science, developed The Pathfinder, a mobile navigation system to enable people to safely and quickly evacuate large, complex buildings.

Ariana Pourkavoos invention Dampening, Quantifying, and Recording Tremor helps dampen, measure and record tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease. “Many people, especially among the elderly, suffer from tremor, which can prevent them from performing basic daily tasks, and cause embarrassing accidents,” says Pourkavoos. “I wanted to create an apparatus that could dampen this tremor, as well as create a method to document and quantify it, and to easily track it over time.”

Elias Starr’s invented the Child Checker—a device that helps prevent children from dying in overheated cars by using a pressure sensor to detect a child in a car seat, and a thermometer to measure temperature. When both pressure and dangerous temperatures are present simultaneously, an alert is issued.