Senior Keegan Forbes and junior Hallie Miller recently won the District 8-0 Regional PennDOT (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation) Innovations Challenge.  The pair will now proceed to the statewide competition.

The PennDOT Innovations Challenge is a statewide competition held by PennDOT for high school students to create a plan on how to raise money for the PennDOT budget deficit. The goal for the teams was to create a marketing campaign and a fundraising idea to help PennDOT cover a five billion dollar budget deficit that they have. Miller said, “I think my partner and I did very well. We spent a lot of time planning and creating a great plan before our competition. We practiced our presentation multiple times to make sure that we were ready to present to the judges.”  The pair created a round up charity called “Round- Up for Roads” for the marketing aspect. “We decided to create a plan to increase registration prices for vehicles and lease land owned by PennDOT to solar panel companies,” Miller explained.

It took a lot for them to prepare for this competition. “We worked with our advisor, Mrs. Emily Miller, a few times a week to make sure that we were on the right track, had everything covered that we needed, and we created a slideshow presentation with graphs/tables to make it easy for the judges to understand our numbers/statistics. We put everything we had into making the best project we could.” The team now looks to improve the presentation for the state competition. “We were a little nervous the first time because we didn’t know what to expect and we were the first group from Dover to ever do this project. We didn’t have anything to look back on to get a concept of what to do. I think if we practice our presentation more before the competition day and make sure we’re speaking confidently, we will have no problem.”