Young inventors take fresh look at old problems

KENT — Ten Kent Center School students in grades one through six put on their thinking caps for this year’s Inventor’s Fair, which was held in the school library on Friday, April 8. This the 20th year for the fair under the direction of reading intervention teacher Lee Sohl, who started the program when she ran the gifted and talented program at the school. The Inventor’s Fair is entirely voluntary, although the participating students were awarded extra credit. (The students weren’t made aware of this fact until the day of the fair, though.) It is open to students in first through eighth grades, although the older students often find it hard to make time with their heavy course loads. The inventors document every step of the creative process. They begin by finding a problem that needs to be solved. Then they imagine a device that will solve the problem. Their contraptions must be made with materials that cost less than $25 total. Using recycled materials is encouraged. Getting help from parents is strongly discouraged.At the beginning of this year’s program, about 80 students signed up, but only 10 persevered through the entire process. The 10 that made it were true multi-taskers: four of them were in the school play, and one even participated in the fair after a week of being out sick. The inventions came in every shape and size, filling the needs of the children who created them. Sixth-grader Lily Bournival made a heater for her trumpet, keeping the instrument warm when it had to be left in the car. “If I play my trumpet after it’s left in the car, the mouthpiece gets stuck and the keys don’t work,” she said. “I wanted to be able to practice right away without waiting 30 minutes for my trumpet to warm up.” Bournival made her Instru-heater out of a heating pad that was inserted in her trumpet case. First-grader Leah Darby constructed a Catamascratcher, a device that solves a problem that most cat owners are familiar with: a cat that wants attention in the middle of the night. “I have a cat at home that keeps meowing in the middle of the night,” she said. Leah built her Catamascratcher out of a box, inserting scratchy objects into the top of the box so the cat can walk in and scratch itself. Health-conscious second-grader Katherine Cortese created a Be Healthy Bracelet. The bracelet was decorated with beads of different colors, each of which represented a different section of the food pyramid. There were different numbers of each color bead, representing the amount of each food category that a person is supposed to eat in one day. At the end of the fair, a panel of three judges chose two winning inventions: the Be Healthy Bracelet and Katherine Starr’s Dinner Decider, which helps families decide what to serve for dinner. The two Katherines will now move on to the state Invention Convention at the University of Connecticut in Storrs on May 14. Lily Bournival and first-grader Max Von Seufert (who constructed a tube that would prevent his favorite keychains from breaking) received honorable mentions.