Teachers Who Inspire Students to Invent Can Transform Lives

When teachers present their students with real-world challenges to solve, they show them that they have the power to improve lives in their community and beyond.

For National Teacher Appreciation Week, we’re celebrating teachers who are inspiring their students through invention education.

Clara Mabour was a student in Oakland Park, Florida, when she met a teacher who would change the course of her life. Randa Flinn invited Clara to join her InvenTeam, a program with Lemelson-MIT that encourages high school students to develop technological solutions to real problems. Their team decided to focus on solving the issue of providing clean water after disaster relief.

This experience caused Clara to dedicate herself to studying STEM in college and then to pursue teaching. She became a biology and global perspectives teacher at her alma mater, and is now mentoring her own InvenTeam, which last year tackled the problem of disrupting mosquito breeding to prevent infectious diseases.