Home : Volume 27 : Spring 2001 :
Water gun, infrared control take top honors in annual Schoofs and Tong Competitions

Andrew Mommsen demonstrates the Automatically Pressurizing Water Gun, which took first place in this year's BRAINSTORM The Schoofs Prize for Creativity contest. (18K JPG)

Second-place winners and Tong Prototype Prize recipients Brandon Ripley (left) and Steven Nackers invented an infrared device-control system for mobility-impaired people. (29K JPG)

The Automatically Pressurizing Water Gun, a new twist on such popular water guns as the Super Soaker, received first prize and $10,000 on Feb. 22 in the annual BRAINSTORM: The Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition. With student inventor Andrew Mommsen's water gun, users pressurize the water with a CO2 cartridge rather than pump the gun by hand.

The winner of the $2,500 Tong Prototype Prize was a self-contained electronic system that enables people with severe limited mobility to perform such tasks as triggering a nurse-call button or operating a television via infrared response. Called TiRECS (pronounced tee-RECKS), or the transmissive infrared environment control system, it was designed and built by students Brandon Ripley and Steven Nackers. Their invention also won second place and $7,000 in The Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition.

Held on the engineering campus, the Schoofs competition challenges entrants to develop unique, patentable, marketable ideas and prototypes. The $2,500 Tong Prototype Prize honors the best prototype developed for the competition. Both contests are open to all UW-Madison undergraduate students, and are administered by the Tong Prototype Prize (Tong). The competitions are sponsored by engineering alumni Richard J. Schoofs (BS 1953, chemical engineering) and Peter P. Tong (MS 1965, electrical engineering).

Other Schoofs Prize winners:

• Derek Daun and Sean Nannan, third place and $4,000 for the Over-Braking Safety Hazard Initiated Taillight, a rear strobe light that activates when a vehicle decelerates at an excessively quick rate.

• Edward Fisher, fourth place and $1,000 for the Smart Pen, an electronic recording and computing "pen" that records and processes handwritten text or graphics.

Contest sponsor Richard Schoofs (center) with inventors Sean Nannan (left) and Derek Daun, whose Over-Breaking Safety Hazard initiated the Taillight idea received third place. (32K JPG)

Edward Fisher's fourth-place Smart Pen records handwriting and downloads characters to computer. (20K JPG)

The competition's judges were UW-Madison engineering alumni David Bohn (Agilent Technologies), Todd Kelsey (Plexus Technology Group) and Cynthia Bachman (Plumbing North America, Kohler Co.).

Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu

Date last modified: Tuesday, 22-May-2001 09:05:50 CDT

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