Three Hopkins Students Head To The 2022 First LEGO League Global Innovation Award | Eden Prairie

The PAWSome Packing Product protecting the LEGO ship.

The Great Gatsbys, a team of three Hopkins students, are finalists for the 2022 First LEGO League Global Innovation Award.

The team is among 19 other finalists chosen from tens of thousands of teams from more than 110 countries.

They will be in St. Louis from June 21-23 where they will showcase their invention, participate in workshops and be judged by industry experts.

This is the first time a Minnesota team has made it this far in more than ten years.

Tanglen Elementary sixth-graders Evelyn Cameron and Gavin Ferro, as well as North Junior High seventh-grader Lucian Pier, make up the team. The three were interested in the competition because they all liked LEGOs. For Pier, it was also his third year competing.

There were two parts to the competition: a themed LEGO Robotics portion and a themed innovation portion. This year’s innovation theme was the transportation journey of goods.

For the innovation portion, the students invented and submitted PAWSome Packing Product, an environmentally-friendly, multi-use packaging material.

“It basically is a biodegradable, recyclable, compostable packing peanut that also functions as a cat litter,” Pier said. The goal was to make a sustainable packing peanut that wasn’t terrible for the Earth and that people would actually use.

The PAWSome Packing Product protecting the LEGO ship.

According to Ferro, the team brainstormed different items that were bad in the transportation journey of products.

“We chose packing peanuts with that theme and we decided to go for it,” he said.

They thought about ways to replace Styrofoam, considering paper and fabric, as well as bases made out of mushroom or seaweed. Eventually they met with a company that works with recycled paper, which they ultimately chose to work with.

However, the Great Gatsbys wanted to be even more innovative with the idea: making multi-functional packing peanuts that can also function as cat litter.

Because using just paper would be odorous, they thought about using lavender as a scent. They also wanted to make it lightweight to lower the cost, choosing to make it in the form of an elbow-macaroni shape by wrapping it around a straw during the formation process.

To test that their product worked, they mailed a box with a LEGO ship inside while using their packing peanuts.

“We mailed it to ourselves and when we took it out, nothing had broken off,” Cameron said.

The product can also function as small animal bedding, which Cameron tested on her guinea pigs.

The team came together to begin last August and have been working vigorously ever since, meeting several times a week to research, refine and create the packing peanut product they have now. They presented their product in February at the state tournament, winning an innovation award. They later found out they were in the top 20 out of 35,000 teams in the world to make it to St. Louis global competition.

While one of the team’s favorite parts of working together was a cotton candy party, they also liked innovating to create a novel idea and experiencing a patent application. Patterson Thuente, a Minneapolis-based law firm, put together a provisional patent application Pro Bono in the US Patent and Trademark Office for their product.

“Just sitting in a really big chair in a corporate conference room, just for whatever reason, felt really really good. I’m in a corporate meeting room and I’m in the big chair,” Pier said to a chorus of laughter.

Alyssa Pier, Lucian’s mother, said their family has a long history with getting involved in this competition. They initially became involved and created teams because they wanted their children to get better exposure to science and math.

“I said ‘hey, I heard about this LEGO League thing and turns out anyone can coach it.’ Literally anybody can coach it. Any of your readers could start a team. Or, most schools have a team,” she said, adding that instead of joining another team they chose to create their own and fund it themselves.

Allison Ferro, Gavin’s mother, said their family moved from California to Minnesota in 2019. Given her current career as a physical chemist, the math and science world has always been important to her and Gavin had always been interested in it. The three families then came together to create this year’s team.

“It ended up being, no offense kids, but a trifecta of super moms,” Pier said.

Their number one jobs as advisors were to help guide the team of students, telling them when to slow down, ask questions and understand the why behind what they’re learning.

“They had to learn to collaborate and rely on different strengths and then develop the things that weren’t their strengths, because they’re three very different kids and they all had different strengths coming into it. … I think everyone improved on all of their things and it teaches you as a team that you can’t be all things,” Pier said.

For her, that’s the best part of being able to do this.

“Because in the real world, Elon Musk did not single-handedly do anything, right? Any great thing happening in the world right now is a group of people working together toward solving a problem, so this is just getting them ready to be successful and leaders,” she said.

The team is responsible for covering all travel expenses, as well as food and accommodations to attend. Anyone can donate at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-get-us-to-the-global-innovation-summit?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer.

Community Choice voting for the 2022 Global Innovation Award has also opened. Anyone can vote by typing in "Gatsby" in the search bar. Anyone may vote once per day during open voting between June 14-21, 2022 and the winner will be announced during the Awards Ceremony Broadcast on June 23, 2022, which begins at 4:30 p.m. Central Time with a meet the teams segment and ceremony at 5:30 p.m. Central Time on FIRST TV - https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires.

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