JPL Annual Invention Challenge - 2007

The tenth annual JPL Invention challenge was held inside von Kármán Auditorium for the first year ever, due to the rain storm that arrived early Friday morning. Twenty school teams and three JPL teams vied for top honors in this year's "Play a Song" Contest. A crowd of over 300 students and JPL employees, friends, and family watched as the teams attempted to get their devices to play the C major scale and their own song.

The objective of this year's contest was to create a device that is capable of performing two tasks. The first task is to replicate a C Major scale. The second task is to play at least the first ten notes of a recognizable song of your choice in proper pitch, tempo, and meter. No electronic speakers or electronically produced or amplified sounds are permitted. Points will be awarded for overall appearance, overall creativity, task 1, and task 2 with a total possible point count of 100 points. The winner of the contest will be the person/team whose device receives the highest number of points.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to all of the teams that worked so hard to get to the finals.

A special thank you goes out to Maggie Porter, Kim Lievense and Kim's team for making the video release process as painless as possible. Because of the weather situation we did not need to worry about the badging as much, but their team was prepared for that aspect of checking-in as well. Additional thanks goes to Randii Wessen for keeping everyone entertained between performances and to Chris Landry for keeping the event moving. Grace Juong, the pianist, did an excellent job of interpreting the sheets of "music" that were given to her and I appreciate all of her and her husband's hard work in getting the keyboard set up and ready to go. The judges (Jo Stoup, Glenn Beardsley, and Dave Taylor) did an outstanding job of making sure that the scoring was fair and impartial.

The volunteers for this year's contest did an outstanding job, as always, and I wish to acknowledge their efforts.

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Paul MacNeal
paul.d.macneal@jpl.nasa.gov
Phone: (818) 354-7824