JOURNEYS OF INNOVATION
High school students’ entry in a national invention challenge inspired a community—and the inner inventor in a future educator
BY JENNIFER McINTOSH
Twenty-one-year-old Katia Avila Pinedo arrived at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, excited to share her student invention journey that opened the world for her and her high school teammates.
She was speaking at the National Summer Teacher Institute, an educational program run by the USPTO. The annual program offers teachers the opportunity to learn more about invention and intellectual property, knowledge they can bring back to the classroom—and serves as an example of the transformational power of invention education.
Avila Pinedo was raised in Pomona, a working-class city of about 150,000 near the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in California. Nearly three of four residents have Hispanic or Latino origins, according to 2023 U.S. Census Bureau data.
Despite excelling overall at Garey High School, Avila Pinedo said she didn’t feel very challenged. She happened upon a flyer for an invention club during her sophomore year and decided to check it out.
The Lemelson-MIT Program, a leader in invention education, offered a program that sought innovative high-schoolers to team up and create inventions to solve self-selected community problems. These “InvenTeams” would be given grant money to build a prototype of their invention and present it at Eurekafest, an event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.
The school’s first invention club consisted of seven girls and one boy, representing six countries: the United States, Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, Nepal, and the Philippines.
Members found that their low-income community had a very high diabetes rate and limited access to health care. The team turned to community members for a better understanding of the problem.
After pivoting from an earlier idea, the team decided to create a diagnostic tool to help diabetics monitor oxygen levels and blood flow in their feet. Eventually, their invention named “Heart and Sole” became a reality, but there were a number of challenges the team had to overcome. The high school had no coding, engineering, robotics, or other specialized STEM courses to teach students the basics.
Sensing the insecurities, science teacher Antonio Gamboa stepped in and mentored the students, telling them that what they perceived as a liability was really their superpower.
“Your background enriches you. You can always learn what they learned in school, but they can’t learn what you have learned by living in this community,” he said.
Taking on this challenge helped Avila Pinedo discover her inner inventor and inspired her to become an educator.
More than five years after Avila Pinedo picked up the invention club flyer, she and her Garey High School InvenTeam were awarded U.S. Patent No. 11,382,564 on July 12, 2022.
Gamboa said: “The next generation of students, as they walk into my classroom … they see it. You can see it on their faces—it is like, this is not your average classroom. The patent matters, as you are an inventor.”For the entire story, see uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innovation.