It’s not every day that students can say an event they competed in is going to be made into a Netflix documentary. However, on October 17, seniors Mason Armstrong and Hayden Allee were part of a team in an annual invention competition called Make48, which will premier on PBS and Netflix in the summer of 2017.

Four students from the Northland CAPS program were nominated to spend 48 hours developing a solution to this year’s problem, the inconvenience of loading and unloading laundry.

“We had a wide range of skills. Everyone had their own part in creating it,” Allee said.

The first 24 hours, the problem was presented and the teams began to develop their ideas.

“We started brainstorming on how to fix it, while doing research on why it is a problem,” Armstrong said.

The next 24 hours were spent preparing for the judges presentation.

“I thought I was going to be super nervous because they had a big production with people recording you, but it wasn’t too bad and it turned out to be pretty good,” Allee said.

The judges then decided which prototype should be brought to the market. Three team’s inventions were selected for that next step.

The NCAPS team’s invention did not qualify, but the team still learned valuable lessons from the event. From spending nearly 48 hours straight working with each other to develop a solution, which teaches endurance, to learning what it takes to present an idea to a group of potential investors, Make48 gave students a look into what life is really like after high school.

“It taught me to be able to fight through what senior year brings,”Allee said. “I am in two college classes, so having to go through a lot of homework taught me how to get through it.”

For Armstrong, he feels he now has a better understanding of what it takes for product development and what it takes to develop a solution to a problem.

“Maybe in the future or in college, I may decide to make something or sell something to a company,” Armstrong said.

Senior Barrett Paul, an NCAPS student and part of the business strand, was a volunteer for the event and helped develop a social media marketing plan to go into effect after the event. The plan utilizes social media platforms and will be presented to Make48. Now, Paul has a better idea of what he wants to do after college.

“I got a better understanding of social media marketing, but I probably don’t want to do that one day,” Paul said. “I probably want to do other types of marketing other than social media because it’s hard to get that out there.”

The television series will show this year’s Make48 and the three chosen products’ road to development.