真正的颜色

去年春天, Melanie Cotta ’26 and Echo Panana ’26 traveled to Florida State University to compete in the ACC InVenture Prize, an annual event in which students from Atlantic Coast Conference schools pitch their ideas to a panel of judges for the chance to win $15,000. 科塔和帕纳纳投了顺化, a device they invented that helps people with visual impairments sort laundry by color.

To use 色调, you place it on an article of clothing and then press a button. 该设备, 使用内置扬声器, announces the item’s color and the correct temperature for washing the fabric. Cotta and Panana came up with the idea last year while taking a class taught by Department of Engineering Chair Glen Gaudette, who encouraged them to enter the InVenture competition. After submitting a video presentation of their device, Cotta and Panana were selected to compete in Florida alongside fourteen other teams of student inventors and entrepreneurs from across the ACC conference.

色调, Gaudette说, aligns with the mission of the department of engineering, which is designed to help students engineer solutions for crucial human needs. “A lot of times, it’s not complicated devices that people need,” he said. “They need simple everyday solutions. 顺化就是这么做的. It was an everyday solution to a real problem for a lot of people.”

Though Cotta and Panana didn’t win the competition, they remain excited about 色调’s potential to help people. We asked them to tell us more about their invention.  

Where did you come up with the idea for 色调? 

Panana: As part of Glenn Gaudette’s Introduction to Human-Centered Engineering class, 我们参观了校园学校, which supports students with complex medical needs, 洗衣日. The staff mentioned that students who were visually impaired and had low mobility really couldn’t help with laundry at all, so they wanted to know how they could get them more involved. 

你是怎么制造这个装置的?

Panana: I had taken a class on Arduino [an electronics platform] in high school and knew it could hold a color sensor and LEDs, and through research found out it could produce sounds. We built it in the maker space at the Schiller Institute, and ordered all of the parts through the BC engineering department. 

You made 色调 an entire device rather than
只是一个应用程序. 为什么?

赤土色的: The main advantage of our idea is that it’s accessible. There are a lot of color apps out there that tell you what colors things are for color-blind people, but the advantage of 色调 is that there’s something physically there, which allows older people who don’t use apps, 或者行动不便的人, 使用它. That’s the market we were trying to hit. 

如何让色调成为一项业务?

赤土色的: We had a Zoom question session with the judges before we flew out to the competition, and one recommended that we partner with Tide or another laundry brand to try to expand our audience that way. 

What stood out about the competition?

赤土色的: They had a keynote speaker who had competed in previous years, and turned their invention into an actual company. 然后, one of the judges talked to us and gave us tips on other competitions to apply to, 我们要用哪个.

Panana: Many of the competitors were a lot older than us, and had been to many of these competitions, or founded companies that have been in the works for years. We learned from people who have done it. We got a lot of contacts from other entrepreneurs, 这很有价值, regardless of whether we continue with entrepreneurship or not. 

Did 色调 change how you view engineering?

Panana: I’ve personally never thought about assistive technology [products that help people with disabilities] as a field that engineers could be in. The only thing we’re usually exposed to is prosthetics, specifically in a hospital setting, but not in this context of helping students at the Campus School. Being able to talk to the people we’re designing for was a fun, new experience. ◽