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What participants say

Hoopla Rack

Hoopla Rack,
third place and $4,000,
2008 Schoofs Prize for Creativity;
third place and $700,
Tong Prototype Prize;
and Younkle Best Presentation Award

“Through the whole process, I actually began to see my design turn into a prototype, and now my prototype might actually become a patented reality. By the end, I was so happy that I had chosen to take a chance on myself and do something that brought my engineering and hooping life together.”

—Danielle McIntosh

Pen Smart

Pen Smart,
$1,000 Judges’ Award for Special Merit,
2008 Schoofs Prize for Creativity

“I thought of this product two years ago—I wrote it down and kind of forgot about it for awhile. And I realized that if I didn’t do it, I’d always regret it, so I just decided to pursue it. The competition is a great outlet for anyone interested in innovation and development. The experience gives you the tools to develop the idea and the confidence to continue.”

—Daniel Gartenberg

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Tong Prototype Prize 2007

Mechanical Water Purifier

Mechanical Water Purifier (large image)
Mechanical Water Purifier

Mechanical Water Purifier: chair and a bed

“Worldwide, there’s over 1.5 billon people without drinking water, so the market’s huge. Our goal is to get these out and to get them built on-site through materials that they already have. It went through a lot of different iterations. We kept trying to make it cheaper, more simple, and easy to assemble — with no electricity and minimal moving parts. This is what we came up with: a sand filter and solar box.”
— Bryan Faust

“There’s a lot of stuff that we didn’t really think about in the design process that we learned by prototyping. When you pull water out of the sand filter into the solar boxes, it creates a vacuum that pulls the water through faster than it should, so we had to add on a vacuum-breaking mechanism, which is a piece of pipe. Things like that you don’t really think about until you get into it.”
— Brady McDermott

Innovators: Bryan Faust, Greg Troszak, Braden McDermott and Chris Stone



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