The annual ASME Innovative Showcase (IShow) is all about breaking down barriers. That is, the show was designed to celebrate ingenuity, the next generation of engineers, and to show college students that an entrepreneurial career path is both viable and respected.

This year the eighth annual IShow will be held at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Monday, April 28. The student entrepreneur teams selected to participate will pitch their ideas and products to a judging panel of industry experts consisting of Evan Burfield of 1776, Lynden Davis of the ASME Foundation, Steve Davis of SpaceX, Bill Flook of The Washington Business Journal, and Tech Cocktail’s very own Jen Consalvo.

After all is said and done there will be 3 top teams who are awarded a share of the prize money, intended as seed funding, with $25,000 going to first place, $15,000 for second place, and $10,000 for third. In addition to the funding, winning competitors will get industry recognition.

During the application process ASME was looking for creative, entrepreneurial students with a new innovation they wanted to take to the next level. ASME settled on 10 different collegiate teams to participate in this year’s event, and the first 50 people who sign up for the event get a free ticket on us!

The 10 teams in the competition are:

Columbia University – Pedal2Power: A pedal-based cellphone charging platform that lets families charge their phones with their bicycles during their daily commute.
George Washington University – EcoPetro: An apparatus that attaches to underground gas storage unites, liquefying and converting Volatile Organic Compounds into useable oil.
University of Hawaii – The SmarTummy: An abdominal training manikin that mimics the look, sounds, and feel of different abdominal ailments in an instantaneous fashion.
Johns Hopkins University – AccuSpine: A pedicle probe for the accurate placement of pedicle screws in spinal fusion surgeries.
Johns Hopkins University – Proscia: A bioinformatics startup that takes the guesswork out of cancer prognostics via a cloud-based system that enables efficient, precise, and quantified answers in cancer pathology.
Rice University – Team BiliQuant: A two-component approach to determine bilirubin concentration. The first component is a paper-based cuvette for plasma isolation from whole blood samples and the second component is a spectrophotometric device to read the absorbance of bilirubin within the acquired plasma.
University of Massachusetts, Lowell – Nonspec: A prosthetic limb for developing nations that allows quick adjustments to meet a patient’s needs.
University of Michigan – New Aegis: They have developed a smart-padding foam composite for sports helmets capable of both reducing the initial magnitude of impact forces by 30 percent and diminishing the resulting shockwave.
University of Virginia – The Otter Belt: An inflatable personal flotation device designed to be worn around the waist that provides high maneuverability and comfort to the wearer while being visually unobtrusive when deflated and unneeded.
Western New England University – The Agile Edge: A portable, motorized ice skate sharpener that fits into a small sports bag.

Courtesy by http://www.Tech.co