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Invention & Design:
Students to Inventors Introduction

Introduction

After conducting a successful college-level course on invention of the telephone, and created another based on the potential for solar energy as an environmentally-friendly source of energy. We piloted them in two three-week sessions of a Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) for rising ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade students at the University of Virginia (see Profile of the Students below). For three hours every morning, students were exposed to background material and/or worked on their group projects under the supervision of the course instructor. Every afternoon, the students returned to the classroom to work on their projects under the supervision of SEP counselors. Although students were not required to work on their projects in the evening -- they participate in social and educational activities at that time -- the counselors reported that many students spent a significant amount of time on course-related activities, such as typing patents, preparing presentations, and reading optional background material. The telephone module required students to design an improvement on 19th-century communications devices, using modern equivalents of the materials available to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876; the second project required them to invent a solar energy technology that would have global environmental benefits. Each module included the following assignments:

  1. A team design that resulted in a working prototype.
  2. Notebooks in which students kept a detailed record of experiments and compared their group processes to those of other groups and to those of actual inventors.
  3. Oral and written presentations of an interim stage (i.e., referred to as a caveat, a turn-of-the-century legal document) and of the final results of this activity (the patent).

Students received constructive criticism on their preliminary designs when they completed their caveats, and an expert on the invention of the telephone served as a patent examiner during the groups' patent presentations. Students were provided with background material through introductory lectures, videos, access to on-line resources via the internet, and access to the university library system. For example, during the telephone unit students listened to a brief lecture on circuit design and the telegraph, viewed an autobiographical film of Bell's life, and accessed several supporting documents. These materials included copies of Bell's patent for the telephone, Elisha Gray's caveat, several design plans for simple telephones, and books on communication, the telephone, and electricity (e.g., The Cartoon Guide to Physics; Gonick & Huffman, 1991). They were also given a chance to explore Bell's invention process in detail.