Connie Liu
Connie is a mechanical engineer from MIT, a passionate educator, and founder of Project Invent. She taught design thinking and engineering at the Nueva School, one of the first K12 design thinking programs in the country. There, she developed curriculum and taught classes in robotics, wearables, design thinking, and engineering to gifted high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now, she runs Project Invent to inspire high school students to invent technologies that make a difference. Project Invent invention programs tackle real-world problems. Students build impactful technologies for and with their community alongside a trained mentor and community client. They transform maker spaces into impactful spaces for designing products for social good.
As an engineer and inventor in her own right, Connie has focused on designing assistive technologies to empower those with disabilities. Her engineering work has included designing, building, and programming an in house manufacturing robot for critical parts of the Mimo Baby Monitor. She also developed the hardware and circuitry for the FingerReader, an assistive device for blind people to help them interact with text-based documents.
Connie also speaks and hosts workshops at various national and international conferences. She specializes in speaking about project-based learning, girls in STEM, invention education, design thinking, and service learning.
Connie has authored an article about Project Invent for Childhood Education: Innovations, which will be published in the January/February 2019 issue.