Calistoga inventors tackle heat stress, sexual assault education on national stage
CALISTOGA - While sitting in his sophomore-year physics class at Calistoga Junior-Senior High School, Jayden Sibbu didn't really know what he wanted to do in the future.
Sibbu said his parents suggested joining the Navy, but the idea didn't really feel right.
But everything changed when his teacher, Heather Brooks, saw the eyeglasses Sibbu had made, complete with a voice-activated wiper system. Upon seeing his potential, she recruited him to join the school's Lemelson-MIT Inventing SMART Solutions class, which features a curriculum designed to help students identify real-world problems in their communities and design tangible technological solutions.
For the last two years, Sibbu has been a valued member of the class, often taking the lead on soldering projects related to the first major challenge the high schoolers dived headfirst into - creating a device to combat the severe heat experienced by wildland firefighters.
Now a participant in a nationally recognized team of young inventors, Sibbu said the class itself has dramatically altered his future trajectory.
"I really have a passion for engineering. I really like using my hands," he said. "I feel like I really found this passion and can confidently say I want to pursue engineering."
Each member of the class has been shaped to varying degrees by their participation in one of the invention teams. Some, alongside Sibbu, developed technology with applications that could save lives in Calistoga and beyond, which is something Brooks said MIT was upfront about when she began exploring bringing the program to the high school a couple of years ago.
"Their objective is simple," Brooks said. "They want to change the lives of your community through the class."
This month, two invention teams from Brooks' class competed at the U.S. National Invention Convention at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where they represented California against student inventors from across the country.
The two projects they brought couldn't be more different in form, but each traces its roots to the community just outside their classroom doors.
Fighting the heat
A simple observation, garnered from firsthand experience, led to the first of the students' inventions - wildfires in the area have had a devastating impact on the people and land they call home.
"All of us went through the tragedy of being evacuated," Brooks said. "We wanted to help the firefighters out for saving our town."
When the class interviewed wildland firefighters, they learned that heat stress is the leading cause of death and injury among firefighters battling wildfires. The Calistoga students learned that current solutions, such as water-circulating vests and cold cloths on the back of the neck, don't actually work the way people may think.
"If you put a cold rag on your neck, it's like putting an ice pack on a thermostat," explained senior Elias Escobar. "The system will think the room is cold, but it's actually not."
Research pointed the team toward the body's glabrous skin - the forehead, palms and feet - as the primary sites of heat transfer. Since hands and feet weren't practical, they settled on the forehead.
The result is a wearable thermoregulatory device with a sensor placed under the armpit that continuously monitors core body temperature. If it rises or falls by one degree, the device automatically activates and cools the wearer down.
One of the first changes to the device was a polarity switch, which can warm the wearer up. The addition came at the request of farmworkers, in another industry close to home.
"A lot of our families have ag workers," Brooks said. "They said, 'What about us?'"
Junior Troy Brooks has been part of the project since the beginning, helping write the code that governs the device's temperature-sensing logic.
"Working on this device has meant a lot to us community-wise," he said. "We have so many family members and close friends who have worked either as firefighters or as agricultural workers."
The team has taken the device to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's EurekaFest, the California state capitol and South by Southwest, where presentations to strangers opened their eyes to the invention's wider potential.
"We saw so many people saying, 'Hey, I'm a hibachi chef; I could use this' or 'I'm a construction worker,'" said Troy Brooks. "That's why we changed our slogan to 'anybody and everybody under the sun.'"
Since its inception, the complete device has been condensed to roughly 6 pounds. Escobar and his classmates worked with electrical engineering teams from Sonoma State University to redesign the internal components and consolidate what had been a tangle of wires into a cleaner circuit board. The team also holds a patent secured through Microsoft's Make What's Next program.
"All my hobbies came together," said Escobar, who plans to study mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. "It solidified what I want to be in the future."
Inventing a curriculum
Although the second project the class brought to Michigan took a less traditional form, the invention label still fits.
When looking for project ideas this year, the class noticed an almost complete lack of sexual assault and abuse prevention education in local schools. The team then set about building a curriculum from the ground up, in partnership with RAINN and NEWS, Napa County's domestic support organization, as well as the Napa County District Attorney's Office and local law enforcement.
The result is a set of three distinct curricula, each geared to different grade levels. Younger students receive instruction on boundaries and trusted adults, while their older counterparts receive more specific discussions on grooming.
Getting approval to use the curriculum in local schools required months of negotiation with administrators over details ranging from minor changes like no cursive on the shirts, and no teal ribbon for the youngest grades, to painstaking decisions about what words could be used at which grade levels.
"We have 200-plus page journals of us going back and forth," said senior Cassandra Saunders. "We can't put cursive, we can't put the ribbon, we can't say 'sexual assault' in kindergarten through third grade - and then they're iffy about fourth through sixth. Six months of that."
But the students kept pushing, in part because they believed the approach itself was different from anything that existed.
"Usually, things that have been made are kind of putting a Band-Aid on something that already happened," said senior Diana Montanez. "We wanted to get to the root of it."
The results suggested the students were on to something. After one presentation at a local elementary school, the school counselor reported that students were still talking about what they had learned and could each name a trusted adult in their life.
The team eventually named their curriculum SAFE - Sexual Assault Fundamental Education - and modeled it on programs like D.A.R.E., envisioning it as something that builds year over year from kindergarten through graduation.
They hope it will spread to other Napa County school districts and are exploring whether insurance companies might have a financial incentive to help fund it.
"It might not be engineering in the traditional sense," Montanez said, "but it's very beneficial for the community."
Michigan-bound
The national competition was held at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. For some, like Saunders, it was their first time on a plane.
Each team got five minutes to present, followed by three minutes of judge questioning, after which the judges took the students' logbooks - hundreds of pages of documented research, setbacks and revisions - and scored them on a rubric.
There was no room for everything they had built over the past two years.
"Having all this information and compacting it into five minutes is crazy," said junior Violet Grove. "We were just spewing as much as we could, but when the timer went off, that was that."
What struck the students most, though, wasn't the competition itself, but what happened afterward. Judges who scored both teams came back after formal judging ended, not to add points to a rubric, but simply because they wanted to keep talking.
One of them left a handwritten note.
"Inventions aren't just things," the judge wrote. "They are tools to learn, change minds, and adjust thinking or attitudes. Your idea has the potential to do that. Keep going."
Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.