Mouse glove, ‘Shocket’ among Toronto science fair projects
Hundreds of teens from around the city shows off creations at U of T event
For their Grade 9 science fair project, Charlie Frise and Simon Scurtu wanted something that could be used in the real world — and started thinking about things that hadn’t really changed since they were first made.
Given the amount of time they spend on computers, they turned their attention to the mouse.
“With the normal mouse, you use the small muscles in your wrist over and over,” said Charlie, 15, a student at Senator O’Connor College Catholic high school. “We made different designs and came up with the idea of making a glove, where the movement is coming from the elbow and shoulder,” and could reduce repetitive strain injury.
Their project was one of hundreds entered in the recent Toronto Science Fair, which is open to students across the city from public, Catholic and private schools and was held at the University of Toronto’s Scarbor- ough campus.
Among the other entries: experiments using pineapples to remove laundry stains (which won a gold medal) or peppermint candies to aid mental performance, as well as an invention by two elementary school students — the “Shocket” — a running shoe with a hidden pocket under the heel.
“I’ve always played soccer, and had to put my money in my shoe (tucking it down the side) for when we get ice cream afterwards,” said Katie Szabo, 13, who co-created the shoe with Jasmin King, also 13.
The girls, both Grade 7 students at Precious Blood Catholic School, researched the materials and design of the running shoes — borrowed from Katie’s dad and Jasmin’s sister — and cut into the heels, used “duck” tape to create pockets, dug out a space for keys and money in the bottom portion of the heel and used Velcro to keep the parts together so the items wouldn’t fall out.
Jasmin said they didn’t have many resources to use at first, even using an electric carving knife on the shoes. (“We got a pretty clean cut,” she adds.)
For the mouse glove, the teens took the base of a regular mouse that had a wireless adapter, buttons from an old CD player, orange and blue hockey socks — from their old house league team — among other items, refining their design through trial and error, eventually testing it on 25 people. The results? “(Test subjects) said it was less painful than a regular mouse, and the actual mousing ability was easy. We asked if they would buy it for $10, that was our cost to make it,” said Simon. (Some 95 per cent said they would.)
“The amazing thing it does, especially with games, is make you feel more immersed in the game,” said Charlie, adding they are thinking of improvements to their design, including a cooler material so hands don’t get sweaty. Other projects included:
Protease, an enzyme, is used for protein-based stains such as blood, sweat, dairy products, among others, explains Vicky Xu, of Marc Garneau Collegiate.
About 30 per cent of the 19 million tonnes of pineapple produced each year is waste. It contains a protease that she found can also remove stains. Her experiment was entitled “A Full Load of Pineapples.”
Gabrielle Vandekas of Notre Dame Catholic high school looked at the teen brain, specifically the under-development of the frontal lobe during the high school years.
Testing problem-solving skills via questionnaire, her purpose was to “justify the poor decision making during teenage years with a scientific study.”
Malvern Collegiate’s Emma Brownlee looked at “Reaction Time Experi-Mint,” looking at how peppermint affects the brain.
Twenty-five volunteers took an online test with and then without having had a peppermint beforehand. Peppermint did improve their time.