East Elementary, St. Patrick's among schools competing at Keystone's Invention Convention

This year the 18th Annual Keystone Area Education Agency (AEA) Invention Convention will be held at two sites, at Johnson's Restaurant in Elkader for the northern school districts Tuesday, Feb. 22 and at Table Mound Elementary School in Dubuque for the southern school districts Thursday, Feb. 24.
The event is open to K-8 grade students. There will be a morning and an afternoon session at each site. The public is invited to browse through the displays of student inventions any time during the day with the exception of the judging time, which is from 9:30-10:30 a.m. and 12:30-1:30 p.m. at Tuesday's Elkader site, and 10-11 a.m. and 1-2 p.m. at the Dubuque site.
Students identify real-life problems and make an invention to demonstrate how these problems may be successfully solved. Inventions produced by students in grades three through eight will be judged for use of problem-solving skills, creativity, originality of idea, the process involved in solving the problem, and the inventor's oral presentation.

Students from a total of 39 schools will be participating in this year's event. East Elementary School and St. Patrick's Catholic School from Waukon will be among those schools participating in the afternoon session of the event at the Elkader site Tuesday, Feb. 22.
From the event sites listed above, a combined total of twenty-one inventions will be chosen to compete at the state Invent, Iowa! Saturday, April 30 at Hilton Coliseum at Iowa State University in Ames.
Any decisions on cancellation because of inclement weather will be made no later than 7 a.m. for the morning session or 9:30 a.m. for the afternoon session. Next week's Invention Convention events will not be rescheduled in the event of a weather cancellation.