Amazing innovations from Indian school children

Age and geography has got nothing to do with innovation.

The winners -- all student-innovators of IGNITE 10 contest -- will testify to it.

IGNITE is a national competition to harness the creative and innovative spirit of school children.

The IGNITE 10 contest (October16, 2009 to September 15, 2010) saw participation of students from 161 districts of 29 States and Union Territories of the country.

Over all 2,139 entries were received, which ranged from sectors like energy, environment, transport, general household utility items etc. The awards were announced on October 15th, the birthday of children's favorite Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, celebrated as the Children's Creativity and Innovation Day by NIF.

Here we present 18 innovations -- from Class 1 to Class 12 -- and their innovators from different parts of the country.

Click NEXT to read about all the 18 innovations mentioned below:

• Vibrator based overtake alarm
• Crutch with shock absorbers, bell and light
• Mini vacuum cleaner in a shoe
• The Cycl-O-Cleaner
• Tricycle with pre-programmed routes for the visually impaired
• Process of reeling cut or pierced muga cocoons to obtain continuous filament
• Peel groove knife for pineapple
• Locator beeper
• Mechanical porter
• Multiple physiotherapy devices
• Domestic & industrial waste water management in urban areas
• Recycled composite material made from multi layer film plastic packaging waste
• Reading assistant for the blind/low vision people
• Sound/Noiseless horn
• Talking wall-mounted calendar with reminder facility
• Pen that can recharge batteries while writing
• Euphorbia cotinifolia as termite / tick repelling
• System to prevent people from using mobile phones while driving

Courtesy: National Innovation Foundation

Aditya Parashar
Class 7
Tagore Vidya Mandir
Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh

The idea is to incorporate a microphone in the side view mirror in a car to pick up the horn frequencies of vehicles following the car.

Sometimes, when the door windows are up and music is playing, it becomes difficult to hear the horn. The microphone gets activated when the window glasses are up, and sends signal to a vibratory pad on the steering, which will alert the driver about another vehicle following.

He has many other ideas as well like a remote that takes energy from TV light or any other natural/artificial source of light, and a luggage carrier on the top of automobiles with a rotatory base so that one needs just to rotate the carrier to pick up any luggage on any side.

Archana Konwar
Class 8
Butacore High School
Dhemaji, Assam

Archana's idea is to have a crutch with shock absorbers for the comfort of the user and also a bell to alert other commuters and a light to be used during the night.

T Chris Ananth
Class 1
Bell Matric Higher Secondary School
Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu

Young Ananth's idea is to have a vacuum cleaner like small device in a shoe that could suck in dust when a person walks.

The base of the shoe would also have a small dust bag in which this dust may be collected.

The idea is to have a bicycle with two brooms attached to the back wheel. The brooms rotate as one pedals and the brushes sweep away the dust making the drive way clean.

The cycle may optionally include an extra dustbin attached to the front to collect large scraps and pieces of garbage.

Rashmi Maruvada
Class 5
Patha Bhavan High School
Kolkata, West Bengal

Rashmi's idea is to have a tricycle, which will have an inbuilt navigation system with an audio announcement system to inform the rider about the places/landmarks enroute.

Such a tricycle would make it easy for a visually impaired person to travel.

Kaushik Boruah
Class 9
Vivekanand Kendra Vidyalaya
Golaghat, Assam

The process developed by Kaushik helps to obtain continuous silk filaments from the cut or pierced muga cocoons.

Traditionally, the cut/pierced cocoons are used to make gicha yarn in the villages. Using this process, 50 per cent of silk from these cocoons can be recovered; rest can be used to make gicha yarn.

Vishan Popat
Class 10
Navrachna School
Vadodara, Gujarat

Pineapple peeling is a very tedious and cumbersome job, which has been made easy by this device.

Ashuni Patel
Class 10
Navrachna School
Vadodara, Gujarat

Sai Sri Ram
Class 9
Don Bosco Public School
Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh

Who has not faced the problem of misplacing an object or forgetting where it has been kept. Ashuni and Sai Ram's device makes it easy to locate them.

This device can be attached with any item that people generally tend to misplace/forget about.

It is fitted with transmitters/receiver, LED and a sound device. When its remote is pressed, sound is emitted from the device tagged to an item/article and the user can trace its location.

Masha Nazeem
Class 12
Vidhya Vikas Girls High Sec School
Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu

Masha's device helps people specially women, old and children to lift and move heavy objects from one place to other.

This transportable device has a wooden base that can be raised through a jack like mechanism to lift weight.

This device can be hand or foot operated.

Ashok Aasrani
Class 12
Shubham Sen Sec School
Jaipur, Rajasthan

Ashok has designed many simple and low cost exercising devices that help accident victims in rehabilitation.

These are also very useful for people with limb disorders. Some of his machines have already been installed in physiotherapy centres where the feedback has been very positive.

Parth Vaidya
Class 12
Vidya Vijay Bal Mandir
Indore, Madhya Pradesh

Parth has developed a system to process waste water so that it can be used for different purposes like irrigation, construction, washing or producing manure.

Indore Municipal Corporation has in principle agreed to install the system in new residential colonies.

GlaxoSmithKline has also implemented the same in their premises.

Hetal Vaishnav
Class 12
Late Shri SG Dholakiya Memorial High School
Rajkot, Gujarat

By appropriate heat treatment of multilayer film plastic packaging waste, Hetal has converted it into a composite plastic material.

This material can then further be used for making various articles and sheets with the help of extrusion, injection or compression moulding.

Hetal got this material tested at different laboratories and has also filed a patent for the same as well.

Mayank Walia
Class 12
Police DAV School
Jallandhar, Punjab

Mayank's idea is to develop a gadget that can be worn on a hand and which can be moved over text or Braille.

It uses sensors that scan text and Braille and convert it into audio signals for the blind /visually challenged.

Manibhushan Prasad
Class 12
Sindri College
Dhanbad, Jharkhand

Manibhushan suggests each vehicle to have signal (may be IR, infra red) emitters and corresponding sensors.

When the driver presses horn, signals are transmitted (instead of sound), which are picked up by the car in front and a beep alert is there in its dashboard along with a light signal.

Shruti Tyagi
Class 11
Police DAV School
Jallandhar, Punjab

Shruti visualises a wall-mounted electronic calendar, which has an in-built organiser and reminder facility so that one can never miss any event or an engagement.

She has a number of other ideas as well including a push button type stand in two wheelers for the ease of women and old people and voice actuated switch for television and other appliances.

Rahul K Singh
Class 12
DAV Kapil Dev School
Ranchi, Jharkhand

Rahul's idea is to have a pen that recharges a small battery while one writes.

The pressure on the tip of the pen while writing is being used to charge a small battery.

Varsha Singh
Class 8
Apeejay School
Jalandhar, Punjab

Working on a project, Varsha has found out that the said plant can be used as a termite and tick repellent.

Earlier reports mention the use of this plant mainly as a fish poison.

Divyam Gupta
Class 10
Delhi Public School
Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh

In order to prevent people from using mobile phones while driving, Divyam suggests placing touch sensors on the gear lever and the steering.

This means that both the hands need to be either on the steering or on the steering and the gear lever. If anytime, the driver's hand is not on either steering or gear lever (for more than designated seconds), the system will infer that either s/he is using a mobile phone or not carefully handling the steering.

Based on this, the system may react, which can be preprogrammed.

This reaction, as per the programming, may be slowing down the vehicle and bringing it to a halt after some delay, moving to side by giving indicator or simply giving an alert alarm to the driver.