What participants say …

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,
$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

Innovators in the news …
articles about past competitors

The Schoofs Prize for Creativity

Summary of the 1998 Competition

Solutions to problems that most people aren't even aware of ruled the College of Engineering's fourth annual invention contest, BRAINSTORM: the Schoofs Prize for Creativity.

Mike Bauch (left) and Jassem Shahrani (back, right) present their document recovery system to the BRAINSTORM panel of judges. (large image)

Turbo Mule, the competition's $10,000 first prize winner, is a good example. The human-powered vehicle built by Brie Howley, Dave Waters and Eric Wobig is intended to provide inexpensive transportation capable of easing the work-load of people in Third World countries.

"In the African nation of Ghana, approximately 70 percent of all time and 80 percent of all human effort is spent transporting agricultural materials," says co-inventor Dave Waters. "A lot of that is carried on women's heads. Turbo Mule could relieve a lot of that burden."

Although conceived as an aid to people in underdeveloped countries, the inventors say the vehicle could also be used as a taxi, factory cart or recreational vehicle just about anywhere.

Last year's first place, $10,000 winner, Theodore Van Deburg, created the "Urilet," a combination toilet and urinal. The toilet lid flips up in such a way as to turn the toilet into a urinal. The idea is that one could have both in half the space.

Turbo Mule, which won Brainstorm's $10,000 first prize, is a human-powered vehicle capable of easing the workload for people in Third World countries, such as the African nation of Ghana. Pictured, contest sponsor Richard Schoofs (left) with student inventors Eric Wobig, Dave Waters and Brie Howley. (large image)

BRAINSTORM awards cash prizes to undergraduates whose inventions are judged most creative, novel, innovative, patentable and likely to succeed in the marketplace. The contest is sponsored by Richard J. Schoofs (BSChE `53) Chairman of Schoofs Incorporated.

Schoofs, who attended the judging, says he is amazed at the variety and quality of the ideas that students bring to the competition each year. "Other contests at other colleges may provide the pieces and ask students to build something from them. Others give students a specific challenge and ask them to find solutions," Schoofs says. "This is the only contest I know of that allows students complete freedom to take an idea that is near and dear to their heart and run with it."

The result, Schoofs says, is a wide field of entries that makes the judges' task of comparing and evaluating very difficult.

This year's judges included Deepak Divan, president and CEO of Soft Switching Technologies; Bob Drane, vice president of Oscar Mayer new product development and total quality management; Harry Engstrom, attorney with Foley & Lardner; Erica McIntire, director of Wisconsin Small Business Development Center; and Matt Younkle, 1996 BRAINSTORM first-prize winner. Judges questioned students on technical, marketing and patent-ability aspects of their inventions.

For the third year, two $2,500 prizes for best invention prototype were sponsored by COE alumnus Tom Aschenbrenner. Aschenbrenner says he wanted to give students the incentive to increase their workmanship skills.

Laura Jensen (left) and Patrick Maguire developed The Up-Lift, a device to help disable people use the toilet. This invention took second place. (large image)

"But more importantly I wanted them to get their minds into this contest," Aschenbrenner says. "They get insights while constructing a prototype. It forces them to improve their invention. The time they spend building a prototype will allow them to be creative."

Team Turbo Mule won one of the $2,500 Aschenbrenner prizes. Third place $4,000 winner Scott Kurszewski won the other for Hold It, a quick-release, self-locking clamp used to secure a snowmobile to a trailer. The clamp is designed to speed and ease the dirty and time-consuming task of securing a sled for transport.

Laura Jensen, Patrick Maguire, Chad Vande Hei and Vidya Balakrishnan took a second place, $7,000 prize with The Up-Lift. The Up-Lift is a device designed to safely lower and raise a person from a wheelchair accessible toilet. The system is ergonomically developed to move with the user and fits on a standard toilet without remodeling the restroom.

Scott Kurszewski (right) explains his snowmobile clamp to Richard Schoofs. (large image)

The judges awarded two fourth place $1,000 prizes. One of the winners is Eric J. Iverson for Recycling Plastic Welder. The recycling plastic welder enables an operator to feed strips, chunks, pellets, beads or shavings of plastic filler into a caulk-gun-like applicator in order to repair or join together plastic. The tool can be used for everything from repairing a cracked automobile bumper cover to using milk jugs to seal windows or repair a toy.

The second fourth place winners are Jassem Shahrani and Mike Bauch for Adrol. Adrol is the Advanced Document Recovery Online system designed to record electronic copies of paper documents being shredded. Documents are scanned as they pass through the shredder.

The electronic document is stored in a password-protected directory so that destroyed documents can be reviewed in electronic form.

In some cases, the cash prizes will help the inventors pursue patents and markets for their products. But awards and inventions aside, the real goal of the competition from the sponsor's point of view is in the value of ideas. Schoofs says the most important lesson anyone can take away from the competition is that ideas are important, and with determination and hard work, they can be incredibly lucrative.

The message was not lost on student inventor Jonas Zahn, who told judges during a presentation, "We're trying to start a garage-based business here. Our dream is to make a living doing what we love to do."