In order to help you follow the rules, broaden your horizons, and activate your thinking in youth science and technology innovation activities, we introduce to you several common topic selection ideas and creative techniques for making small inventions. I hope you will get spiritual encouragement, methodological enlightenment, inspiration for research and creation, and say knowingly: "I can do it!".
1. What is a scientific invention?
When the word "invention" is mentioned, some students are afraid. How difficult is that! In fact, creating inventions is not a mystery. Many inventions made by primary and middle school students have won awards nationally and even internationally!
Scientific inventions refer to those things or methods that young people find unsatisfactory and inconvenient to use in their daily study, life, and work, and use the scientific knowledge they have learned to design and manufacture them. The emergence of new items or methods that are more desirable and convenient than those that exist yet. Compared with "big inventions", the range of choices is narrower, the problems solved are relatively simple, the materials used are easier to find, and the money spent is not much, so it is called "small invention".
Are there quality standards for small inventions? have. An excellent small invention should have "three properties", namely novelty, creativity and practicality.
1. Novelty. Novelty means that before you complete this little invention, there has been no product with the same content or technology. In other words, you cannot buy the same product in shops on the street, nor have you read or heard the introduction in books, magazines, radio and television; the same invention has not been applied for and recorded by others at the patent office. In the patent application documents, there is no declaration by others to participate in invention and creation competitions at all levels. However, if you add new functions, new methods, and new uses to other inventions, or cleverly combine several original items to form a new individual and add new functions, then It is also considered novel.
Hospitality Shoes
One day, classmate Wei Qiang and his father went to a friend's house as a guest. As soon as he entered the door, he was stumped: the host's house was carpeted, and it seemed awkward not to change his shoes. polite. Change your shoes, your feet smell bad again. After returning home, Wei Qiang thought: It would be great if there was a kind of slippers that could be worn without taking off the shoes on the feet! Later, he was inspired by the velcro on travel shoes: attach velcro to the straps of the slippers, snap them on and pull them apart. Can they be adjusted to make them fatter or thinner? So he found a pair of old slippers, cut the loops, and sewed on Velcro to make "hospitality shoes." This small invention won the third prize in the 4th National Youth Invention and Creation Competition.
In fact, Wei Qiang’s little invention was just a transplant of someone else’s invention, Velcro, onto slippers. It gave the slippers new functions and the Velcro a new purpose. The small invention also has novelty.
2. Creativity. Creativity means that a small invention has outstanding substantive features and significant progress compared with the existing technology of similar products.
Convenient Soap Dish
If the ordinary soap dish is filled with water, the soap will become sticky and difficult to take out. The life of the soap is also very short. Fan Ping, a student from Tianjin, invented a convenient soap dish using the principle of leverage. Open the soap dish and the soap will stand up. Compared with similar products, it is technically more advanced and won the first prize in the first National Youth Invention and Creation Competition.
3. Practicality. Practicality means that the invention can be made or used and produce positive effects. Small inventions must be able to be made into real objects, not just ideas or design drawings, but must also be able to solve practical problems in production and life.
Insect-proof tree skirt
Linxian County, Shanxi Province is rich in jujubes, but the jujube bug is very harmful to jujubes. Liu Yan carefully observed the growth and activity patterns of the jujube worm and found that the female worm would climb up the trunk to mate with the male worm and then damage the leaves and fruits. He came up with a way to put a hard plastic piece around half of the tree trunk and apply insecticide ointment on the inner layer to prevent the female insects from getting up the tree. This simple and ingenious insect-proof tree skirt is highly practical and has been welcomed by jujube farmers. It won the first prize in the 6th National Youth Invention Competition.
Of course, completing a small invention is not as simple as "furrowing your brows and thinking about it". It requires steps such as topic selection, conception and design, production, practical testing and improvement, and success.
The first step in making a small invention is to determine the object of the invention and consider what problem to study. This is topic selection. For teenagers, they should start from the reality of life they are familiar with and look for creative themes in school, family and surrounding life circles. For example, when you encounter some difficulties in study or life, you will definitely say: "It would be great if there was such-and-such a thing." The thing you want to invent can be used as the object of invention. However, when choosing a topic, students must combine their own knowledge level and design and production capabilities, and do not dream of inventions that are impossible to achieve.
After the genre is selected, the next step is to conceive and design. That is, based on basic scientific principles and experience, the form, structure, method and implementation plan of the topic object are designed. When conceiving, try to come up with as many design plans as possible, and then select the best structural plan based on feasibility and practicality. It is better to use simple materials, be clever and easy to implement, and have the least shortcomings.
Once the idea is mature, you can start production. During production, existing conditions should be used as much as possible to produce exquisite works with little or no money. For some technical issues, you can ask teachers and parents for advice. Sometimes you can also find relevant manufacturers to help make some parts.
After the small invention sample is completed, it needs to be tested and improved in practice. That is, use the work for a period of time, discover problems during use, and solicit opinions from parents, teachers, and classmates to see if there are any improvements or unreasonable areas. Then, the opinions from all aspects are combined to improve the small invention. Almost every excellent little invention is "modified".
At this point, you will enjoy the joy of success. Next, you can apply to participate in youth invention and creation competitions at all levels, apply for patents, or submit articles to newspapers and periodicals. The application documents for the competition mainly include the application form, project description and supporting materials provided by the organizing committee. Among them, the project description content is: how was the topic of the invention discovered, how was the invention plan designed, and how was the invention made? How does this invention demonstrate novelty, creativity and practicality? What is your creative contribution? Suggestions and ideas for further improving the invention. Attach appearance drawings (preferably black and white photos), structural drawings, schematic diagrams and other necessary diagrams and information. Any small invention projects involving medical and health care products, new varieties of animals and plants, and nationally protected animals and plants must also provide certification materials from relevant departments.
Making scientific inventions is something that everyone can do, and it is also an interesting practical activity. As long as everyone carefully observes the things around them, is good at discovering and asking questions, boldly explores, hands-on practice, and has the courage to break through the constraints of rules and regulations, there will be innovations and inventions.
Two ideas for selecting topics for small inventions
1. List the shortcomings to find a topic
To learn to make small inventions, you must first learn to choose an invention topic.
An important method is to start from the things that are not smooth, convenient, and unsatisfactory in study and life, list the shortcomings, and ask more "What shortcomings need to be overcome?" and then look for ways to overcome the shortcomings. This method, which proposes reform ideas based on the shortcomings of existing items, is called the shortcomings enumeration method. It is also a simple and effective method for selecting small invention topics.
Four-way anti-shock socket
Almost every household has a power socket, but it is easy to get electric shock, especially dangerous for children, and it is troublesome to plug in and unplug. Xu Chen from Shanghai dissected several traditional power sockets and designed a "four-purpose anti-shock socket". This socket has two insulating valves installed in the sockets of ordinary sockets. Only the plugs can be inserted at the same time. Only when two jacks are connected can the power be connected. In this way, when a child accidentally inserts a small hand or a nail into any jack, there will be no electric shock since there are two doors blocking it. This small invention won the first prize in the 2nd National Youth Science Creation and Invention Competition.
Improvements in air pressure water bottles
Are there any disadvantages to air pressure water bottles? have! Because its water outlet pipe is inserted directly into the bottom of the bottle, every time the water is pressed, the sediment at the bottom often makes the pressed water turbid. Aiming at this shortcoming, Zhang Xueke, a classmate from Beijing, made improvements to the pneumatic water bottle. He connected a section of rubber pipe to the suction pipe, and added a plastic floating ball to the pipe mouth. Since the ball always floats on the water, the sediment at the bottom of the pneumatic water bottle is Will not be sucked out of the straw. The invention won the third prize in the Second National Youth Creation and Invention Competition.
Listing the shortcomings of items is actually discovering problems, and creating inventions is precisely to solve existing problems. Therefore, every time we discover a shortcoming and raise a question, we often find an invented problem.
So, how to research and discover shortcomings?
First of all, you should always pay attention to the shortcomings or inconveniences of the items you use daily, and be good at grabbing an item to dig into it. Umbrellas are a commonly used tool for people to protect themselves from the sun and rain. It seems that there is not much to say about it, but some inventors, big and small, are clinging to it and making new innovations with each passing day, such as sun umbrellas, double umbrellas, folding umbrellas, mother-child umbrellas, and fast umbrellas. Dry umbrellas, astronomical umbrellas... there are endless ones. It can be seen that there are many invention themes for one thing, and the same theme can be used to form different inventions with various design solutions. Let’s take the pen as an example. It has many shortcomings, such as the pen cap is easy to fall off or be lost, the pen tip is easy to clog, the round pen holder is easy to slip off the table and damage the pen tip, and it is invisible when writing at night during a power outage or in the field... When you try to do as much as possible After carefully listing the many shortcomings of an item, according to your ability, select a certain shortcoming or part of the shortcomings as the research object to determine the topic of the small invention.
Inflatable solar cookers are very attractive to people, but current solar cookers are expensive, complex in process, bulky (about 50 kilograms), and troublesome to adjust. It is inconvenient to carry when working and traveling. Based on investigations and research, Lian Xin and other students from Shanghai have clarified the main direction of attack: simplifying the manufacturing process of solar cookers, reducing weight, reducing material consumption, reducing costs, and obtaining maximum power. They first bonded the edges of two circular plastic films, inflated them to expand into a paraboloid, and then attached a vacuum aluminized polyester sticker to the reflective surface. Use a pump to pump air inward to change the pressure of the gas inside. As the amount of air is pumped, the upper transparent film will bulge upwards and the reflective surface will be concave, which can achieve the purpose of automatically converging and reflecting light. This "substrate-less inflatable solar cooker" weighs only 4 kilograms, is easy to disassemble and assemble, and is easy to carry. It won the first prize in the 3rd National Youth Science Invention and Creation Competition.
This invention is actually the result of multiple transplantations: they transplanted the technology of inflatable toys, the self-adhesive stickers of daily commodity trademarks, and the parabolic structure like convex lenses to the new solar cooker. He transplanted the knowledge of optics and fluid mechanics principles from the textbook to the design of the solar cooker and successfully completed the small invention.
Candle lamp
Candles are a commonly used lighting tool, but the candle flame is afraid of wind, the candle body is not easy to fix, and the brightness cannot be controlled. How to improve these shortcomings? Liu Guohong, a student from Jianli Middle School in Hubei, first considered fixing the candle body and preventing wind. He inserted the candle into an iron tube and covered it with a glass cover. He thought of the fixing method of a bayonet light bulb and borrowed it from a candle lamp. He installed a spring to keep the candle flame in the optimal center position of the lampshade.
How to prevent candles from crying? To solve this problem, the temperature at the top of the candle must be continuously lowered to allow the heat to be conducted and dissipated around it. There are metal heat sinks on the front of the car's engine. Can we also use them as candle lamps? He drilled a large hole in the metal box of the body balm, cut the cut heat sink into the shape of an electric fan, punched a similarly large hole in the center, and welded the cut heat sink to the box (the larger of the two holes should be aligned).
How to control the brightness of candle flame? Inspired by the air valve of a gas stove, he used two ferrules with air windows on the inside and outside (the inner ring used an iron box under the radiator, and the outer ring used a plastic ring made separately), and controlled the air flow by turning the valve. , realizing the wish to adjust the brightness of the candle flame. This invention can be said to be a combination of two "transplanted grafts": the lampshade is from a kerosene lamp, the fixing method is from a bayonet light bulb, and the heat sink is from a car.
It can be seen from this that the transplantation method is a very meaningful invention idea. If students master it well, they can come up with quite good inventions.
The key to using the transplantation method is to expand your knowledge, understand some new technologies, and often analyze the principles and functions of some items or a certain structure. In this way, there is more information available for transplantation in the brain, and you can trust it at your fingertips when making small inventions.