By Jennifer K. Morita

February 28, 2025

Sociologists usually tackle problems from within – studying an issue, engaging the community and pushing for policy reform.

But Sacramento State professor Christopher Rogers has Sociology, Engineering and Business students inventing their own solutions instead.

“I tell students all the time: At the end of the day, people save people. Not institutions,” Rogers said.

Rogers’ new Invention Education course teaches students to identify a problem in the community, design and build a product to solve it, then create a business plan to sell their invention.

Students finish the semester with a provisional patent and better understanding of the career opportunities on their horizon.

“Think ‘Shark Tank,’ ” Rogers said. “They’re not just building an original invention, they’re learning to commercialize it and one day, own it.”

The interdisciplinary course was first offered last fall at the Carlsen Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Students filled out a skills questionnaire that Rogers used to group them into balanced teams. He hopes to offer the course again next fall.

Each team decided on a problem to work on and brainstormed ways technology could solve it. Then they designed and built their project at the StingerStudio Makerspace next to the Carlsen Center.

For Carlsen Center Executive Director Cameron Law, the chance to work with Rogers to create an interdisciplinary experience for students was exciting.

“Bringing different perspectives to look at a problem differently and then being able to innovate a solution and giving them the opportunity to, at some point, commercialize or patent that, it’s certainly something the Carlsen Center wanted to get behind,” Law said. “It’s a great on-ramp for students to explore, but with a tangible experience of working in the Makerspace.

“Oftentimes terms like ‘innovator’ or ‘entrepreneur’ might not land until students realize they don’t have to be the builder. They could be the one who helps market it. So that team dynamic was really powerful,” Law said.

Many of the students’ inventions involved wearable devices, including ones that monitored anxiety, tracked hydration levels for field workers, and increased safety at night for women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Other teams also came up with a high beam crosswalk system for pedestrians and a mobile generator that could be used in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods during power outages.

“You’re building ways to reduce the harm in people’s lives. You’re not waiting for some reform effort, whenever that may happen, to save them,” Rogers said.

The team that built the generator originally wanted it to use food scraps to produce energy that could be stored for later. But a demonstration of Sac State Sustainability’s biodigester – and its odor – quickly changed their minds.

They went solar instead.

“We were thinking of the storms in Texas, where all the power was going down,” said fourth-year Sociology student Nevaeh Trigo. “Economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are likely the last to get help or have generators of their own, so what if we have a mobile one that stores energy like a rechargeable battery?”

Rogers’ inspiration for the course came years earlier when he was working his first job out of college. He was an administrative assistant for Lemelson-MIT, a Massachusetts-based program that helped students, mostly in K-12, learn how inventors solve real-world problems.

“I feel like this class broadened my pathways. I never thought we could help at the invention stage, or that computer scientists or programming engineers would even think of asking sociologists what knowledge we could provide.” -- Nevaeh Trigo, Sociology student

Rogers wanted to expose STEM – or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – education to undergraduate students as well.

“Lemelson has this idea that anyone can be an inventor. I’m like, even students at the undergraduate level can be inventors,” Rogers said. “Let’s have faith that even students who are a little bit older can learn something brand new.”

That idea resonated with Trigo, who thought the only pathways in Sociology were social work or academia. Rogers’ course, however, opened her eyes to new possibilities.

“I never thought of sociologists working within the field of developing apps for Google or Apple,” she said. “But there are a lot of things technology does that helps people, such as people with disabilities.

“I feel like this class broadened my pathways. I never thought we could help at the invention stage, or that computer scientists or programming engineers would even think of asking sociologists what knowledge we could provide.”

Students also learned, however, that innovation takes time.

Trigo and her team went back and forth about what issue they should take on and the proper wording for their project, not to mention how to design and engineer their invention.

“One of the biggest things I had to teach students was that learning isn’t a linear process,” Rogers said. “There’s a lot of ups and downs, and back-and-forths. Wrestling with that is so important.

“It increased students’ confidence in their ability to engage in STEM concepts and skills, which is important because they may take more STEM courses and look into more STEM-related career paths,” Rogers said.

Trigo added that her team members learned from one another.

“We definitely had different points of view and different experiences,” she said. “Business, sociology and STEM are completely different bubbles, so all of us coming together was pretty great.

“It showed me that within a team of people who come from different fields, we all have the capacity to come together and build something for our communities. It showed me that I belong in a STEM career, and I could make it. It’s not as scary as it seems.”