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Brimming with ideas

Pity the poor placekicker on a high school or college football team. He always has trouble finding someone to do the dull job of holding the ball so he can spend hours practicing one kick after another after another.

Derek Zoch pitches Quicker Kicker to judges at the PennVention competition. The Quaker placekicker and Wharton student, with mechanical engineering major Steve Jones, won for the fooball holder.
Derek Zoch pitches Quicker Kicker to judges at the PennVention competition. The Quaker placekicker and Wharton student, with mechanical engineering major Steve Jones, won for the fooball holder.Read more

Pity the poor placekicker on a high school or college football team. He always has trouble finding someone to do the dull job of holding the ball so he can spend hours practicing one kick after another after another.

The problem inspired two University of Pennsylvania juniors, one of them Penn's varsity placekicker, to invent the Quicker Kicker. It's a mechanical device that drops the ball into place so that the kicker can practice the precise timing needed to step into the kick and boot it through the goalposts.

Derek Zoch, the Quakers' placekicker and a Wharton management major, and mechanical engineering major Steve Jones, were among the winners Friday at PennVention, an annual competition for student inventors looking for ways to develop and sell their ideas.

Listening to presentations from the 10 teams of inspired young inventors who made it to the finals of the months-long competition was inspiring in itself. The range of ideas and the energy the students put into developing them provided hope that solutions can be found to some perplexing problems.

Naturally, the students also were inspired by the hope that their inventions would be money-making commercial successes. Each team is required to study and provide data on the potential market for its product or process.

But the point of the competition, sponsored by Weiss Tech House, a student-run center in the Penn engineering school, is to encourage innovation among young people brimming with ideas and entrepreneurial spirit, university officials say.

Karl Ulrich, a professor in both the engineering and business schools and director of Weiss Tech House, said the center was set up five years ago to give students a place to turn dreams into reality. At least one or two of the PennVention winners each year has had some commercial success with inventions, he said.

"We have a very entrepreneurial student body," Ulrich said during a break in the competition. "They were doing business in the dorms. . . . We have 10,000 undergraduates, and 10 percent of them are involved in Weiss House. It's a very practical-oriented place, and this fits well with Penn's mission. Think Ben Franklin."

This year's first-place winner was Radiosonde Recovery, a project of engineering graduate students Warren Jackson, Kevin Galloway, Bill Mather and Chris Thorne, who received $5,000 in cash. Their robotic device with GPS navigation capability is designed to help scientists recover the weather and atmospheric data-collection instruments they shoot into low-Earth orbit. The device makes them easier to find after they land.

Second prize of $2,500 in cash went to Innovative Protein Technologies, an invention of biology graduate students Noel Byrne and Pravien Abeyrickrema that provides a fast, automated way to do laboratory analysis of proteins to determine if someone has a specific disease.

Other students, including the Quicker Kicker team, won smaller cash awards, or hours of free advice from professional entrepreneurs or companies that helped sponsor PennVention and served as judges.

Training student inventors in all aspects of developing and selling their ideas is a key aspect of the competition, said Allison Rae, a senior account manager at Paramount Industries, a Langhorne product-development company that is one of the sponsors.

"Many inventors think their ideas will make them millionaires," Rae said, "but they're worthless unless you can get them to people."

Zoch, the placekicker, has already talked up the Quicker Kicker to college and professional coaches, who he said were enthusiastic about the concept of the invention. The only competing product on the market is a simple, stationary steel device that sells for $50, he said. His invention would cost about $150.

Zoch said he believed that, besides coaches, the parents of middle-school and high-school football players who were worried about their children being injured may want Quicker Kickers.

"Why not make him a kicker?" he asked in his pitch to the judges. "He's not going to get hurt."

Penn's Invention Competition

The finalists in the third annual PennVention competition were:

Circumed, a drug-delivery platform that offers a new approach to treat thrombotic diseases.

Fodius, a technology to alert people to their entitled financial assets upon someone's death.

imageThis, a less-intrusive radio-frequency probe for clinical magnetic resonance imaging.

Innovative Protein Technologies, an automated protein-analysis tool.

Lab Aide, an academic tool to train future researchers.

Movement Quantifier, a pressure-sensing technology to help athletes in training.

NexGel, a prosthetic used to replace the damaged nucleus of a disc.

Quicker Kicker, a mechanical football holder for placekickers.

Radiosonde Recovery, a robot that recovers instruments sent to near-orbit altitudes.

Ultra Slim Card and Key Holder, a device for one-handed access to cards and keys.EndText