Weyerhaeuser donation to help East students travel to MIT

A donation from an area timber company has put Greenbrier East’s InvenTeam fundraising goal over the top.

The Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund presented the engineering students with a $2,500 check on Monday, May 23. The donation will help pay for the InvenTeam to travel to MIT in Boston this June to present their entry in this year’s Lemelson-MIT competition.

The InvenTeam students were awarded a Lemelson-MIT grant for 2021-2022 in the amount of $10,000 to develop its invention of a Digital Junction Tracker that can be used in cave rescue operations. The grant money paid for the research, development, and production of the device, and the team is excited to show MIT what they’ve done this year.

The Digital Junction Trackers function as “breadcrumbs” that cavers can leave behind as they explore deep into the earth. The small, orange boxes are about the size of a deck of cards and cavers can leave them at the mouth of a cave, then leave them about every 50 feet or so as they travel inside.

Inside the orange box is a transmitter that can track cavers’ whereabouts in emergencies, which will be instrumental in aiding in cave rescue operations.

The InvenTeam has built the entire prototype in their classroom at Greenbrier East and look forward to putting the device into production.

“We’re working on a provisional patent, so these guys could leave for high school with their names on a provisional patent, and then we have a year to get it to get a utility patent. There’s nothing like this on the market,” said the InvenTeam’s faculty advisor Kevin Warfield.

This is not the first time Greenbrier East has received the Lemelson-MIT grant; they received it in 2017 as well.

“We’re one of eight schools this year to get this grant,”said Warfield. “In 20 years, only 2,900 students have gone through this program. The fact that we have gotten the grant twice – I’m just dumbfounded.”

In 2017, the team used the grant funds to invent Greenbricks, building materials designed to reduce the volume of cardboard in landfills by producing a building material from the waste. Greenbricks can be used to replace standard bricks or deployed as a system to create temporary buildings after a natural disaster.

On Monday, the InvenTeam students were on hand to meet with Laurel Kemmerling, the Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund committee chair, who was there to present them with a check for $2,500 to help cover their travel expenses.

“This is something to really be proud of,” said Kemmerling. “You don’t see a lot of young people doing these kinds of things. And it’s awesome that the school offers this. When I was in college, I did a summer intern program where we did things like this on a way smaller scale, like just fiddling with LED lights, so this is awesome.”

Greenbrier East InvenTeam members are joined by teacher Kevin Warfield (back left) and principal Ben Routson (back right) as they receive a check from Weyerhaeuser employees Carolyn Hannigan (front left) and Laurel Kemmerling (front right).

InvenTeam sustainability team member Evan Vogelsong demonstrates the outer casing of the digital junction tracker. The outer casing is fully biodegradable and glows in the dark for easy viewing in caves.