2006 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Presentation Secondary School, Loughboy, Co Kilkenny
Vanessa McGrath, Tara McGrath & Nicola Woodgate
TRIZ for Kidz


Vanessa Mc Grath, Tara Mc Grath and Nicola Woodgate at the exhibition receiving their award from Minister, Mary Hanifin, TD.

Our future economy depends on our young people's innovation and invention skills in order to add high value to our products. We cannot compete on labour cost alone with low cost economies.

Ireland needs to be an innovation and technology provider rather than be a taker.

We developed an inventing machine Fun TRIZ for KIDZ to create a structure for learning and applying invention and problem solving to address this need.

A web search on inventing machine introduced us to Russian TRIZ by Altshuller. We found that inventive solutions mostly follow common inventive principals and involve resolving technical and physical contradictions.

As people become more specialised in a particular field they can ignore common solutions and inventive principals found in other fields. Yes, anyone can learn to invent, innovate and find solutions to problems.

This Russian methodology, however, is highly complex and is difficult to learn and apply as it was written for engineers using engineering terminology.

Our objective was to develop a simplified version of TRIZ using its own inventive principals and come up with a more advanced version with the novel integration of a hybrid Internet search engine.

Our TRIZ module has two levels.

Basic or level 1 is a Fun TRIZ card game of TRIZ for kids. This is ideal for teaching kids, yet is still a powerful tool for all who need to cut to the chase quickly and simply.

Here we used the principal of Yu-gi-uh, Pokemon and Digimon cards. We were astounded by the ability of children to apply complex strategy to a myriad of graphical cards in a game environment with such ease.

We used the game card concept to get rid of complexity. Wow!!! We were getting results with TRIZ already.

Advanced Level 2 TRIZ 4 kids is an advanced tool built on the same game card idea as level 1. Level 2 is web based with libraries of TRIZ type principals, contradictions and solutions all again with game cards and descriptions.

Case studies. Finally we used basic TRIZ to come up with a number of novel inventions. We also were set a series of problems relating to wind farms to solve using TRIZ.



Vanessa McGrath, Tara McGrath, and Nicola Woodgate entered their project in the Intermediate Group Section in the Technology Category of the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in January 2006. They won one of the top prizes � Runner-up Group Award. Their teacher was Ms Joan Cashin.


This article was sponsored by Oldbury Publishing Limited.