NMS Students Recognized For Invention Projects

By Eliza Hallabeck

As the school year begins to wrap up, two students from Newtown Middle School recently shared with The Bee details about inventions they created for eighth grade science projects that earned them attention at a statewide competition.

About 60 eighth grade students at the school created inventions to be submitted to this year’s Invention Convention competition, which showcases student inventions and recognizes them with different awards. Newtown Middle School had six invention convention finalists: Kiera Cohane, Melanie Curtis, Zoe Eggleston, Victoria Hanulik, Alie Kron, and David Swigart.

Five of the six were able to attend the state invention convention on May 2 in Storrs, and of the five, two won prizes. Zoe Eggleston won for having the most patentable invention and Melanie Curtis received the Recognized Inventor Award for her spill-free mixing bowls.

After attending a special dinner for recognition of her award, Melanie said that each student in the competition had to create an invention that could solve a problem. Her invention, she said, “Solves food not coming out of a bowl when you mix.”

“They didn’t want you to spend a lot of money on your invention,” Melanie said, while describing how she created her spill-free mixing bowl. The device Melanie created is a bowl-like device that fits another bowl within it to hold it in place.

Melanie, who is in one of NMS teacher BJ Liberty’s science classes, said she came up with the idea for her invention after being inspired by her friend Molly Bryant, who owns a device that holds an apple in place.

“My idea was to put a suction cup on the bottom of bowls to keep it in place if you are preoccupied,” said Melanie.

Melanie said, although the Invention Convention competition is an outside of the classroom competition, the project of creating the invention was a long-term project for her science class this year.

Zoe Eggleston, a student of NMS teacher Ben Andracchi, said during a separate visit to The Bee that moments after learning of the project she knew what she wanted her invention to do. Zoe tried to come up with solutions to creating her invention for months, but it was not until a couple days before it was due, and many ideas later, that she came up with her winning design, which she could not share due to pending research for a patent.

Without getting to details, she could say that she created an invention that measures the thickness of ice, because the average human should not attempt to walk on ice if the surface is less than four inches thick, she said.

Her device floats on the lake before the ice freezes, and after the ice is formed the device can be used to measure how thick the ice is. Zoe said she wanted to solve the problem of measuring ice because she used to go ice fishing with her father.