Putting young minds to work

SARA ARNATSIA

The second floor of Iqaluit’s Nakasuk School is filled with many young Einsteins. The students have gathered to show off their talent and creativity at the school’s annual invention fair.

There are new inventions, some slight alterations of things that have already been invented and some things that are just plain cute.

An encouraging poem reads: “Don’t feel blue, I know its due, Hop up and down and say Wiggle, wiggle, woo.”

Pooka Niviatsiak and Cassandra Gallbraith, both in Grade 5, invented a water clock. The clock consists of a bottle with a little hole at the bottom. The bottle is filled with water, and the water drips through the hole into a container below. A marker on the side of the bottle indicates when a minute has passed. These clocks were used in the ancient times before electric clocks were invented.

Eric Bens and Calvin Tilley created a portable desk made of cardboard and paper towel tubes. Tilley explains that you can take the desk anywhere. For instance, you could work in a car or on a plane. “First we thought of a newspaper holder, then we thought of a reader and a writer. My dad suggested that we call it a portable desk,” he says.

Sarah Tugak speaks on behalf of her daughter, Natalie Ittinuar, because Natalie is too shy. “My daughter invented a fork chop stick,” Sarah says. “You can eat regular food and Chinese food at the same time.” The tool consists of a plastic fork with a handle that has been sliced in half lengthwise.

Many of the board games were variations of Monopoly. An inventive take-off of the three-dimensional Snakes and Ladders game was called Angels and Devils.

There was a colourful fish hook organizer with different shapes and sizes of hooks.

Patrick Joannie invented umbrella glasses. “When it’s raining, you put these sunglasses on and the umbrella stops all the rain from going down your glasses,” he says.

Keegan Mackey invented a device that attaches to a pencil to hold a sharpener and eraser. He came up with this idea because he kept losing his sharpener and eraser.

Grade 5 teacher Anita Murphy says that the annual event has become very popular with kids. Some of the kids had help from their parents, but some had no help at all. “They’ve been given no class time to do this,” she said.