The IgniteStem Design-Thinking Challenge

Recently, a few of my friends and I attended the IgniteStem Design-Thinking Challenge, which was held at Princeton University. It was a really enjoyable and enriching experience, and I would recommend participating to any high schooler in the area who wishes to work in a STEM industry.

What is IgniteStem?

The main idea of the challenge was to create solutions that could be used to address various problems that affect communities. This year’s prompt was “Helping Healthcare” and there were 3 challenges that we had to respond to. At the end, we chose what we felt was our best response and presented it to a panel of judges. In addition to the competition, there were also a few workshops about design-thinking and project-based learning that served to teach us skills we could then implement into our projects. In particular, the people running the event heavily iterated the idea of Design-Thinking and the brainstorming process, which we used to collaborate effectively. One of the important distinctions of the event was that we could not use the internet in any form to create ideas, something which forced us to embrace our creativity.

What is Design-Thinking?

Design-Thinking is the concept of coming up with a solution to a problem using a process to first brainstorm, narrow down solutions, expand a chosen solution, and then implement said solution in a beneficial way. This is something that I had learned in fifth grade with my Math and Science teacher, who was a huge proponent of this concept, though I never really used it again until recently in my science fair projects. If you want to see the process we had for our solution, you can view/download our short presentation below.

What did we do?

One of the prompts, and the one that we eventually decided to go with, was to help create a clever solution to a problem that impacts our community. At our school, we realized that about half of our students wore glasses, due to a plethora of reasons. However, glasses themselves are not entirely accessible to everybody who needs them, with the price and time taken to create an ordinary pair of glasses being much too long. Additionally, most vendors require appointments or eye-test results to create the glasses.

Our solution to this problem was to create a photobooth that made the entire process of obtaining glasses a simple, quick, and easy-to-use process. First, the user would undergo an eye test with lenses that could be changed with the simple click of a button rather than another person. Second, a software would be used to take a scan of the person’s face and generate a simple pair of glasses as a 3D model. This model could then be exported to a 3D-printing software so that this model could be printed out using a durable filament. This also would allow for customization via choosing color. A challenge we faced during development of this, however, was the implementation of lenses. These usually need to be fitted professionally, and it would not work with our model for the solution, so we came up with the idea of using magnetic lenses in fixed sizes that were pre-made. This would also let the frames be reusable because popping lenses in and out would become easier. The access to such photobooths would also be more widespread than ever before. Imagine needing glasses and being able to simply walk to your nearest convenience store or pharmacy and only wait a couple hours to receive your glasses. Costs would also decrease drastically as lenses would become the only main expense as labor and frame-material would be eliminated.

Overall, I had an amazing experience at the IgniteStem Design-Thinking Challenge, and our team placed second overall! I once again definitely recommend experiencing an event like this because it serves as a could introduction to the concepts of STEM without as much of the technicality you would see in traditional hackathons. The ideas of Project-Driven Learning were also where I got the idea for my AP Seminar paper from.

If anybody is interested, the slideshow (which we had an entire five minutes to create) is attached below.