Will Rumble Rims Come to Your School?

An award-winning invention could help schools screen for concussions during student sporting events.

Rumble Rims / James Dyson Award 2026 National Winner / The James Dyson Foundation

A teen wears the Rumble Rims headset, which can help identify if the wearer has a concussion.

Imagine this scenario happening at a school: a student playing a game during gym class falls and hits their head on the ground—hard. So the gym teacher moves the student aside and puts a headset over the student’s eyes. A few minutes later, the student rejoins the group and continues to play. What did the headset do? It confirmed the student didn’t have a concussion, or head injury, and that continuing to play was safe.

A concussion can be more than a head rattle. In the United States, approximately one in 10 children or teenagers will get a sports-related concussion each year, and most concussions will not be identified until well after the injury happened.

Rumble Rims / James Dyson Award 2026 National Winner / The James Dyson Foundation

Rumble Rims inventors Radhika Saran, Cleo Pontone, and Sophia DeVito pose with their creation.

Three Harvard students have tackled this problem head-on with Rumble Rims, a headset that could help schools and youth sports teams identify concussions in the moments after impact. Invented by Radhika Saran, Cleo Pontone, and Sophia DeVito, Rumble Rims contains infrared light and sensors. When someone puts on the headset, the sensors track the wearer’s eyes. If the person has a concussion, their eyes will have difficulty following a moving object. Depending on the headset’s findings, it will either report a problem to the adult helping the student or clear the student to return to playing.

Rumble Rims / James Dyson Award 2026 National Winner / The James Dyson Foundation

The Rumble Rims inventors work on their design.

“We wanted to give coaches, athletes and families clearer information at the exact moment of risk,” said Saran. The goal was to help make medical tools “accessible where young athletes are actually getting injured,” she said.

The Rumble Rims invention earned a prize in the 2026 James Dyson Award competition for problem-solving inventions, including $6,500 to help the students invest in developing their project further. The Harvard team plans to have athletes, coaches, and medical professionals test a prototype of Rumble Rims in the hopes of sharing it with schools one day.

Did You Know?

Musk ox males have very thick skulls (about 1.5 inches, or 4 centimeters, in the front) to help withstand headbutting with other males. However, scientists have found that musk ox still suffer traumatic brain injuries during these battles.

Who Made Basketball a Slam Dunk?

Basketball inventor James Naismith holds a ball (left) and coaches students in 1926 (right).

Do you know where basketball got its name? Unlike today, the sport originally used baskets.

In 1891, a Canadian American man named James Naismith had a problem. He worked at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts, where student athletes needed indoor sports to keep them active during the cold winters. What sport could they play in an indoor gymnasium? Naismith decided to invent a new one.

Naismith combined aspects of other popular sports of the time, such as rugby, lacrosse, and soccer, into his creation. Most importantly, he was inspired by a childhood game he played while growing up in Canada called “duck on a rock,” which combined tag with throwing a ball at a target.

Courtesy of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S., © Aspenphoto/Dreamstime.com; Photo composite Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Young men play basketball in 1892 (left) and modern-day athletes play the game (right).

With the rules of play established, Naismith just needed a way for players to score. As the story goes, he asked a school janitor for goal boxes. Instead, the janitor returned with two peach baskets, which Naismith nailed to the railing on each side of the gymnasium balcony. And with that, basketball was born.

The game used peach baskets for years, which meant someone had to scoop out the ball from the basket after each point. Eventually, the players took the bottoms out of the baskets so that the ball would fall through the hoop rather than into a basket. Despite its humble beginnings, basketball is one of the world’s most popular sports today.

Fetch My Armor!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George C. Stone, 1935 (36.25.68a–c), www.metmuseum.org, © picturelibrary/Alamy; Photo composite Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

This 16th-century helmet is from India (left). This elephant armor was used in 17th-century India (right).

For thousands of years, humans have made gear to protect their bodies from harm, especially in battle. Armor made from metal, bone, leather, and even horse hooves kept soldiers safe on the battlefield, if not always comfortable. Read more about historical armor at Britannica!

WORD OF THE WEEK

clobber

PART OF SPEECH:

verb

Definition:

: to hit (someone) very hard

Definitions provided by

Sudoku

Can you figure out where each word goes?

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“In the News: Will Rumble Rims Come to Your School?” Britannica School, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 25 Oct. 2026. https://news.eb.com/level2/will-rumble-rims-come-to-your-school Accessed 26 Oct. 2026 [Replace this date with today’s date.]