Frisco Bound Collegians To Display Inventions

15 E-teams to compete this weekend

College students include some of the most resourceful minds in the world. A few students have gone on to establish well known enterprises such as Mark Zuckerburg with Facebook, Paul Allen for Microsoft and Matt Mullenweg who launched WordPress. Others are busy inventing new products that may someday change our lives.

Inventors seek to hit the target this weekend at Frisco show.

There is a group calling itself The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) whose mission is to provide a “…positive and sustainable social and environmental impact through technological innovation by providing end-to-end service grants, mentoring and other experiential resources to higher education institutions.”

The NCIAA is holding its annual March Madness for the Mind showcase of student innovation this Saturday in San Francisco featuring the nation’s top Excellence and Entrepreneurship Teams (E-Teams), groups consisting of college students, faculty members and industry mentors.

March Madness for the Mind will allows participants to unveil their inventions, some for the very first time. The NCIAA helps teams take their innovative technologies from concept to commercialization by providing funding.

Among this year’s participants are the following groups and their inventions:

• The Polytech Waterbag, in development at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, an easy-to-transport plastic bag with an integrated filter and dispensing port that can help purify and store clean drinking water following a natural disaster.

• AYZH, Inc., a team from Colorado State University, which is bringing low-cost, high-quality products to the developing world to improve rural women’s standards of living. AYZH has already developed a birth kit to help reduce maternal and infant mortality and is now working on an affordable water filtration system, with support from the NCIIA.

• Michigan Technological University’s E-Team, which is developing a new, extra-protective Enhanced BioMorphic (EBM) football helmet layer that will provide shock distribution, absorption and dissipation of head-on impact to protect against concussions and other injuries commonly sustained by football players.

• A team from Stanford University that is developing a low-cost ventilator, called OneBreath, for use in developing nations and large-scale disasters. This affordable device, designed for a possible shortage of traditional ventilators, can be employed to support patients in respiratory distress in emergency environments.

The event will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT on Saturday at the Exploratorium in the Palace of Fine Arts.

Source: NCIAA

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