With $8,000, two years, and five team members, the business Revolutionizing the Lock (RTL), hopes to replace the combination locks in LZHS with quicker, easier, RFID scanner locks. The team won the grand prize of $8,000 to use for their business with their pitch of the product last year.

The business is run by managers Manjot Singh, junior, Karsten Zettlmeier, junior, and Ryan Koester, junior, along with two marketing interns: Camden Pratt, junior, and Oskar Ponikarczyk, senior. The group came together in their INCubator class last year to create their ID scanner for the lockers in the school. Now the team is finalizing their product in ACCELerator, the follow-up course for the groups who won money at their end-of-year pitch.

“We’re hoping that at least by the end of this year, we make sure our technology is safe, sound, and secure because we have $8,000, which should be good if we conserve our spending correctly. We should be able to get it ironed out and perfect. We’re hoping the school district […] will replace the combination lockers with ours,” Singh said.

RTL is planning to finalize its lock and present the finished product to the school board this summer. They hope the district will accept their proposal and that they can install their locks in the next school year.

“Our product is basically meant to make it so within three seconds of reaching a locker you can be in and out. We’ve tested it, and on average, with a combination lock people spend about two, three minutes at their lockers,” Singh said. “With our product, they spend less than a minute most of the time because they can just tap in, tap out.”

For the locks each student has their own identification that the locks recognize using Amazon AWS, a cloud computing program “which is really secure technology,” Singh said. The team will be setting up a challenge for students to try to break into a locker with their ID scanner locks on it in order to test the security of their product. The group hopes their business will be successful, and have a positive impact with the money they received.

“They trusted us with their money, right? We should do as much good as we can with it. Our teachers, mentors, everybody’s cheering us on… This isn’t a normal class, obviously. This is like an actual passion project,” Singh said.

The INCubator class takes a very hands-on approach to learning, unlike the other business classes at the high school, Josh Hollander, business teacher, said. Groups actually create a business with a product and get to practice making pitches and other components of entrepreneurship. Hollander said that RTL has made the most of their time in INCubator.

“[RTL is] one of the more committed and hardworking groups of all of my ACCELerator groups right now,” Hollander said. “They are a phenomenal example for further incubator groups, or for future incubator groups that go on to ACCELerator… I would say that incubator groups that want to know how to go about this program effectively should look at them.”

This story was originally published on Bear Facts on December 10, 2023.