2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been engaging the P-12 Education Community and fostering relationships with prominent invention-focused organizations such as the Lemelson Foundation, Society for Science, and FIRST. In the last decade momentum was gained with the Kids and Educators website featuring stories of inventors, young entrepreneurs with cool patents, famous inventor trading cards and games to teach Intellectual Property (IP). It made its debut at the inaugural National Summer Teacher Institute (NSTI) in 2014. Fast forward to 2022, the USPTO established the Master Teachers of Invention and Intellectual Property (MTIP) program to reach a broader audience of teachers. Many teachers who were veterans of NSTI in past years joined the first cohort of teacher leaders. At the same time the USPTO Kids and Educators website underwent a comprehensive transformation to include all their outreach programs, and EquIP HQ, a new collection of curriculum and ready-made lesson plans, which is still evolving. This paper will broadly outline the efforts of the USPTO and specifically its effect on one teacher’s engineering classroom. The educator has been in a longstanding relationship with the USPTO since 2008 integrating IP lessons into her curriculum. In 2014 she attended NSTI, in 2018, advised a Lemelson InvenTeam, and is now an MTIP participant. Aligned with the USPTO’s goals, her engineering classes have been increasingly enriched in the areas of intellectual property, invention education, diversity and inclusion, and educational equity.