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DLR's Student Innovation Challenge is underway

The Student Innovation Challenge, run by DLR Group starts today and wraps up tomorrow afternoon.  The two-day event features teams from Bennington, Gretna and Elmwood-Murdock.

For the challenge, students create a question pertaining to a real-world problem they would like to solve.  Each of the problems is collected and then handed out to a team. 

This year, the Elmwood-Murdock team got their own question which was, “How can we promote safe driving within our community?”  

Alice Richter, a senior at Elmwood-Murdock is participating in this year’s challenge.  Richter says she and her teammates chose this question because of the number of students who have died in car accidents over the last several years.  

She says the team has been brainstorming solutions to this problem in advance of the competition.

"We’ve contacted some people in the community like a state trooper to set up some programs and maybe do a week of activities maybe later in the school year.  And we’ve already started to kind of try and set that stuff up so we can have a more solid idea.  And we’ve talked to some community members like the Elmwood School Board.  We talked to the head to see if maybe getting a radar detector would be something we could do that would be realistic.”

Though all the teams know which problem they will work on in advance, there is always a twist added when they arrive at the competition.  

Last year’s twist was that a solar flare wiped out the power and technology in North America. 

After the competition, all team members will receive letters of recommendation from DLR Group either addressed to colleges or potential employers.