Jacob Lemanowicz Wins National Inventors Contest

Westlake High School senior Jacob Lemanowicz has been named the national winner of TechDirections Magazine’s 2013 Inventors Competition.

This year students were asked to use their creativity to design a product that incorporated one or more of these recycled items – CDs/DVDs, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and empty sewing thread spools.

Lemanowicz, who is taught by Scott Lutz, created a CD lamp that provides bright, stylish lighting. The lamp provides portability with a battery power source and low power consumption, long lasting LED lights that last up to 100,000 hours over 10 years and durability with the strong plastics in CDs.

"When I received the description for Tech Directions Trash Transformation Challenge," I saw limitless opportunity for creativity," Lemanowicz said in the magazine.

He used the TRIZ system, a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, to ease the assembly of the lamp. 

The lamp uses 192 CDs, supports, 10 LED lights and a 9V battery pack.

Entries were judged by inventor/engineer Harry T. Roman. As the national winner Jacob earned a TechDirections Inventors Award certificate, a book or poster of his choice and publication of his invention in the May 2013 issue of TechDirections magazine.

You can see the invention at http://www.omagdigital.com/publication/?i=156877&p=17.

Jacob also was recently part of a trio of WHS students invited to participate in the White House Science Fair, along with Theodore Poulos and Jacob Hoffman, to showcase their grand prize model home design from the 16^th annual Student Model Home Design Contest.