Talk about a bright idea!

For their invention of a lightbox intended to provide stimulation for patients with severe mobility or cognitive disabilities at the Helen Bernardy Center for Medically Fragile Children at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, two La Jolla Country Day School students took home a pair of top prizes last month at the 2024 Jacobs Teen Innovation Challenge.

The lightbox, dubbed IlluminArt, was designed and built by Allison Casey and Carter Feinman, seniors who have since graduated. The device won the Photonics Innovation Award and tied for first place for the Best Overall Social Innovation Award.

The competition, launched by the Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education at the University of San Diego, featured more than 4,700 students from 32 countries. Its annual mission is to engage teenagers in developing solutions to social issues that align with the United Nations’ Global Goals.

Allison and Carter, both 17, started the project in their junior year during one of the innovation classes offered at La Jolla Country Day. After getting feedback on the prototype, they continued its development into their senior year.

“When we created the project, it was solely for the purpose of helping others,” Carter said.

IlluminArt is intended to provide a fun, interactive, visual and tactile experience for the patients, he said.

To get a better understanding of the children’s needs, Allison and Carter toured the Helen Bernardy Center last year and saw the offerings of its sensory room.

“We weren’t able to see the patients, but it gave me an idea of what they experience every day,” Carter said. “It drove us even more to make something good.”

“We wanted to see who we were making this [lightbox] for,” Allison said. “It was an eye-opening experience to see what they have to work with. There were a lot of projectors and lava lamps, but nothing the kids could interact with.”

So the two got to work on a box with a lever that, when pulled or pushed, changes the color of the lights in the box.

“We sent our initial prototype for a test run and the overall feedback was positive, but we had to change the material of the housing,” Carter said. “The first was wood, but we 3-D-modeled a new housing case and remade it. We also bought a stand that fit the box that could be moved to accommodate beds or chairs or wherever the user might be.

“The first one was hard to clean, but that was fixed by changing the material. We also added a handle to make it easier to move.”

IlluminArt was quickly used by those in the facility’s care.

“We think it is so cool to have this thing that we made being used in an actual hospital by actual patients,” Allison said. “It’s so surreal to me that we accomplished something like that before we graduated high school.”

The two decided it also was ready for the Jacobs Teen Innovation Challenge this year, so they created a video outlining their process, collected drawings and notes to show how the project evolved, and presented the feedback they had received.

Allison said they hoped to win the Photonics Innovation Award and were thrilled when their names were announced May 24.

“It was all virtual, and Carter and I were watching from two different places, but we were texting each other the whole time. It was really exciting,” Allison said.

But that wasn’t all. When the Best Overall Social Innovation Award was announced, “they called the name of the project that we tied with, but we didn’t know it was a tie at the time,” Allison said. “So when they said there was another project that won, we were shocked. We didn’t expect to win the whole thing. It was really cool.”

“It was super cool to see our work pay off,” Carter said. “We didn’t create the product to win an award, but it was pretty great that it did.” ♦