Young Edisons
solve life’s problems
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| Sixth-grader
Jake Kintner with his baby brother, Jonah. Jake created the Aquarium
Baby Safe Lock Box to protect Jonah as his project for the Mills Lawn
Invention Convention. |
Solutions to some of life’s knottiest problems
could be found last Thursday evening in the Mills Lawn School gym during
the school’s annual Invention Convention.
An answer to the black hole that sucks up your pencils
and pens? Try the Powerful Pencil Detector. Tired of discovering an empty
roll of toilet paper at the most inopportune moment? Consider the Bathroom
Helper. And if your back aches from stooping to scoop up the dog poop
in your backyard, you could use the Automatic Drop and Bag.
These three inventions were among the many on display
before an admiring group of parents, teachers and friends of the 52 Mills
Lawn sixth graders who created them.
“Every year I’m surprised at these kids’
ingenuity,” said Mills Lawn sixth-grade teacher Don Nowak, who organizes
the convention. Nowak’s own students take part, as do students in
the sixth grade classes of Jody Pettiford and Beth Dapore.
In its 16th year, the Invention Convention is a rite of passage for sixth-graders,
their last big project before they move to middle school, Nowak said.
Students begin the project in March, with a study of inventors and the
creative process, after which they come up with their own ideas, which
must cost less than $20 to actualize. But before proceeding, students
must use the Internet or the library to make sure their invention doesn’t
exist, said Nowak, who described the project as “an adventure in
creative problem solving.”
Creativity clearly flourished in these young inventors, including Salomé
Garcia Halpin, whose frustration with vanishing pencils led her to create
the Powerful Pencil Detector, an apparatus that she can attach to her
favorite writing utensils. Now when a pencil turns up missing, she simply
tracks it down with a beeper.
The detector has already proved its worth to a young person with a busy
schedule, Salomé said. “I’m saving a lot of time,”
she said.
David Ingham also now saves time, as well as frustration, with his Bathroom
Helper, which aims to alleviate one of a family’s most vexing problems.
“If I’m playing a video game I hear my mom or sister scream
for toilet tissue and I have to go get it,” he said. “I get
tired of it.”
With the Bathroom Helper in place, an almost empty roll of toilet tissue
sets off a noisemaking device, whose jaunty tune alerts the bathroom user
of the impending crisis. However, David said, he is not completely certain
that his invention will solve his family’s dilemma.
The frustration of an annoying household chore got the creative juices
flowing for Cody Toadvine, whose Automatic Drop and Bag helps streamline
his job taking his dog outside several times daily. Tired of all the bending,
Cody came up with a device that strongly resembles a shovel with a hole
cut in it and a plastic bag attached beneath, all of which makes for easy
delivery of dog doo from ground to trash can.
Cody also deserves high marks in the marketing department, for insistently
inviting this reporter to come watch a free demo.
Another student with strong marketing skills was Jake Kintner, who described
his invention, the Aquarium Baby Safe Lock Box, by saying, “It’s
not pretty, but it’s honest.”
Something more than the desire to overcome household frustrations motivated
Jake — he wanted to keep his baby brother, Jonah, safe. Because
Jonah has a habit of sticking his fingers into the surge protector beside
his family’s aquarium, Jake invented a way to keep those chubby
little fingers protected.
The Aquarium Baby Safe Lock Box — designed and built by Jake, with
a little help from his grandfather — is a square wooden lock box
that holds the surge protector. The project wasn’t easy, Jake said,
since far into constructing his invention he discovered he miscalculated
the necessary size of nails and width of wood for the lockbox top. So
he scrapped the whole thing and began again.
But the setback taught him something important about the creative process,
Jake said.
“I learned that you might find out halfway through that you made
a big mistake and you have to start over, but you come out with a better
invention in the end,” said Jake, who now wants to be an inventor
when he grows up.
The most ambitious project might have been Birch Robinson-Hubbuch’s
hovercraft, which he built from a metal lampshade and an inner tube and
which runs on battery power.
“Our planet needs a zero emission, environmentally-sound mode of
transportation,” Birch wrote on his invention’s poster, and
he believes the hovercraft might just be it. He said he got the idea from
reading science fiction and talking with his dad, Behrle Hubbuch.
Although the hovercraft was sitting rather than hovering when viewed by
this reporter, Birch said the vehicle would perform as soon as his dad
arrived. Later reports indicated that the hovercraft did, indeed, hover.
Thursday’s event was a triumph of the creative process, of persistence
and sweat over self-doubt, said Mills Lawn Principal Christine Hatton.
“Every year they start out moaning and groaning, saying ‘I
can’t invent anything,’ ” Hatton said. “And then
pretty soon I hear them bragging to each other about their inventions
at lunch.”
Perhaps in 50 years, these children will live in a world where people
travel by hovercraft rather than SUVs, where lost pencils are a thing
of the past and where bathroom helpers that play jaunty tunes keep family
members from squabbling over empty toilet tissue rolls. And perhaps they’ll
remember the Invention Convention as the time when all those new ideas
first saw the light of day.
—Diane Chiddister
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