A team of inquiring, inspiring young minds from Kickemuit Middle School will put their big ideas to the test later this month as part of a national competition to envision and design possible solutions to the problems of tomorrow.

The team is one of just five schools in Rhode Island — and the only middle school team — to be selected as a state finalist for the 14th annual Samsung “Solve for Tomorrow” competition, which seeks to encourage kids to identify problems or needs in their local communities and to apply science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) techniques towards solving those problems. Three hundred schools are selected in total as state finalists across America.

The KMS team, which meets after school and has a mix of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students, took inspiration from one of their teachers, Pat Fillipino, to come up with the problem they wanted to try and solve.

“We have so many teachers in the building, I can think of three, that have had joint replacements,” Fillipino, who has had both of her hips replaced, said. “I was telling the kids how difficult it is afterwards how difficult it is to be independent. Even though you can still go out with a cane or crutch to get shopping done, your body parts aren’t up to strength yet. You can go to the grocery store, but it’s problematic getting it out of your car and back to your house. They came up with an idea to design a device, to use physics, math, technology, engineering, STEM, to come up with a solution to make peoples’ lives that have had joint replacements easier and more independent until they can finally recover.”

Fillipino said that KMS has made it to this stage of the competition once before around five years ago, when a group of students devised a device to help save people from drowning in rip currents after such hazardous water conditions killed multiple people in Rhode Island. That team didn’t advance past the finals, however. She think they have a real chance at advancing to the next stage of the competition with this new concept.

“It’s not just statewide or Bristol Warren, this could go national,” she said. “There are people nationwide that have joint replacements every single day, and this could help them until they get back on their feet and get a little bit more independent, or even people post-surgery… Anybody that has an issue lifting, even if you’re an older person and just have limited physical movement, this could help you get stuff into your house.”

Fillipino said the team now has to come up with a plan for how they will construct the device, which will then be judged for its ingenuity and likeliness to be successful in an actual implementation of the device.

If they emerge as the state finalist for Rhode Island, they will win $2,500 in technology and classroom supplies, and will have to build the proposed device and present it to a panel of judges in New York City during the national stage of the competition, where the three top teams will each receive a $100,000 grand prize.

Fillipino expressed great pride in the team that has assembled at KMS. A mix of boys and girls, younger and older students, with a variety of skills and interests; from Lego building and coding to those more interested in schematic designs, she said that it’s always encouraging as a teacher to see students engage in activities they feel passionate about.

“They’re learning about areas they don’t know as much about as well, and they’re learning from each other,” she said. “I get very excited for kids who want to learn and put themselves out there, and self-learn.”