Inventors discover practical magic in everyday things
From in-car flashers
to two-step feeders, young kids create the darnedest things
Mike Lafferty
THE
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The world ought to be a little better place this morning after kids solved hundreds of problems yesterday at the Invention Convention at Veterans Memorial.
More than 400 of the best inventions, from ways to find keys in a purse in the dark to avoiding a burned tongue from hot coffee, were shown off at the convention.
The payoff for the very best was a $10,000 college scholarship.
Lorena Grundy, a fifth-grader at Indian Run Elementary in Dublin, took home the top prize with Sound-Off, designed to help emergency vehicles avoid accidents.
As an ambulance, police car or firetruck on an emergency run nears cars and trucks, Sound-Off emits a microwave that turns off the stereo speakers in those cars and turns on flashing lights near the steering wheels, alerting the drivers to the approaching emergency vehicle.
The inventions ran from the altruistic to the everyday.
"My problem is how to pick up smelly dog poop," said Katherine McGrail, a 9-year-old at Dublin’s Bailey Elementary.
She illustrated her prototype for a mobile pooper-scooper using a battery-powered, remote-controlled model car, an aluminum pie pan, some white felt and a fake eyeball.
The idea was for the little car to travel the yard, sense poop, scoop it and compost it.
"It turns into yard-friendly fertilizer and comes out the back," Katherine said.
The convention shows that children are keen observers of their world.
"You come down here to get enthusiastic about the future," said Tom McClain, a longtime convention judge who works at Battelle.
Makoto Ibaraki, a third-grader also at Bailey in Dublin, invented a trap to help rid his home of pesky Asian ladybugs.
He glued a funnel into the top of a liter pop bottle, then mounted the trap atop a tissue box in which he had a flashlight set to shine up through the bottle.
The light attracts the bugs, which fly through the funnel opening into the trap. The funnel’s throat is coated with cooking oil.
"They go in but they can’t get out because of the oil," Makoto said.
Sophie Marquand, a fifthgrader at Columbus’ Indianola Alternative Elementary, and Garrett Levin, a fourth-grader at the Wellington School in Upper Arlington, separately dreamed up variations of a mug with a paper-thin thermometer pasted to its exterior to monitor temperature.
Garrett, who came armed with business cards and brochures explaining his invention, was pumping flesh and selling.
"Have you ever burned your tongue? You really need it," he said. "Companies like McDonald’s get sued for millions of dollars."
Peyton Ennis’ father has Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, so Peyton, a second-grader at Ervin Carlisle Elementary in Delaware, mounted an electric razor on a wooden frame with wheels to help his father shave.
Nine-year-old Salvatore Caradonna’s "Big Dog/Little Dog Feeder" combined genius and simplicity to solve a real problem in multipet families.
His big dog, Lucy, was always eating the food of his little dog, Dixie, until he designed a twolevel dog feeder using a kitchen step stool.
"I thought I would make a tight spot for the little dog so the big dog can’t get the little dog’s food," said Salvatore, of Tyler Run Elementary in the Olentangy district.
And like the best inventions, it works.
First-place winners in each grade category received $500 college scholarships. They were:
• Laura Jeggle, Tremont Elementary in Upper Arlington, in kindergarten through second grade. She designed flip-up pages that allow a teacher to read a book and show words and pictures to a class at the same time.
• Darien Pepple and Andy Cox, Olde Sawmill Elementary in Dublin, in third grade. They created the Wearometer, a thermometer that tells the temperature and whether a winter coat, hat and gloves are needed.
• Maya McCabe, David Smith Elementary in
• Cricket Kowal and Zach Jaffe, Granby Elementary
in
• Chris Dachenhaus,
• David Baker, home-schooled in Bexley, in seventh and eighth grade. He created Grunge Guard, a plastic cover for television remote controls. At hotels, the cover can be thrown out with each room cleaning, limiting the transfer of bacteria among users.
mlafferty@dispatch.com