| on 15-08-2006 13:09 |
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Katie Sedlar recently spent a week hatching her remote control bird, a
white fluffy creature the young inventor pictures dipping and
fluttering and soaring until its batteries give out.
Its beak
will move. So will its wings and its legs. And someday, when this plan
comes to fruition, consumers can choose from hawks and falcons, eagles
and parrots.
Why birds?
“Well, I like cats more, but they can’t really fly,” she said.
Actually, it all started during a visit to HobbyTown USA, where the soon-to-be fifth-grader was eyeing the remote control planes and cars. Then her mind started working. From planes to cars to fast cars with parachutes. And on to birds.
So the fluffy white prototype was born and, on a hot Friday afternoon, came to roost on the second floor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Business Administration. It was ingood company. Because this was a toy fair.
Nearby was the Ultimate Robot and a model of Memorial Stadium (a limited edition). There was the Super Sweep and the Space Car and more, all of which came from the imaginations of children who spent the week honing their creative skills in a camp sponsored by the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship.
The goal of the “Kids Invent Toys” camp is to encourage that natural entrepreneurial spirit in children so they’ll continue using it as adults.
“Children are very creative,” said Cynthia Milligan, dean of UNL’s College of Business Administration as she meandered through the toy fair. “As they move on through life they lose some of that ability to want to work creatively. The goal (of the camp) is to preserve that creative spirit.”
A creative spirit they can take to college, to places like business administration and engineering and the sciences. The week-long camp is not just about innovation, though that’s the heart of it. Kids also learn about market research, about making business plans and getting patents. They talk about Web design and advertising.
Market research is the point of the visit to HobbyTown. Not only to get ideas but to see what’s already out there, said Elaine Warren, coordinator of the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship. When they get back to the classroom, they take toys apart to see how they work. To get more ideas.
And the old toys, donated by Goodwill, some broken, some missing parts, become fodder for creative minds. Twelve-year-old Kody Coggin took electronic parts of different toys and created the Ultimate Robot.
At the toy fair, onlookers could see the cursor blinking on the gray screen of the robot. But just wait. Eventually it will play music, act as a PDA, be a flatscreen TV and offer you access to the Internet. “It’s basically like an iPod plus an X-Box and a Playstation,” Kody said. Oh yeah, and it will have a remote control so it can follow you around. Even to class. “This is going to be th new, future technology,” he said.
The center has hosted the week-long camp for several years. The first week this year was open primarily to third- through fifth-graders; the second week to middle schoolers. The camp is coordinated and taught by students who work for the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship and members of Students In Free Enterprise.
There are a number of activities to get them thinking about how things work. Like rockes they build then shoot into the sky. Or egg protectors they create before dropping eggs two stories down.
Paul Childers, 10, loved the rockets most. Someday, he said, he’d like to build a giant rocket out of Legos.
A day at the Lincoln Children’s Museum helps campers learn about marketing, about who their audience might be, about how to attract consumers.
Nine-year-old Brandon Coggin created a model of the Nebraska football field. It’s $66 for the limited edition.
Now, if you ask, Brandon will admit he’s a huge Patriots fan. But when in Nebraska …
The group toured the UNL Beadle Center to get an idea of the breadth of research and how research can benefit an entrepreneur. Or toy inventor. “They have to understand, to make the plastic car or whatever they need for a toy, they might have to ask some of these people to make something for them,” Warren said. “And pay for it.”
Childers plans to sell his Super Sweep — a trucklike contraption that can sweep up anything, even toys out of reach under furniture, for $12. He figures he’ll make 24,000 to 25,000 a month. “I’ll try to get in the HobbyTown area,” he said.
Katie figures she’ll sell her remote control birds for $40. “That’s $10 cheaper than some of the remote control airplanes,” she said. And the young inventor, busily twisting pipe cleaners into colorful bracelets while explaining her bird to onlookers, has other ideas.
Like the bracelets, which were not just something to pass the time. They were a marketing tool. “If you give them a freebie they remember and come back,” she said. “Otherwise they might forget all of it.”
Spoken like a true entrepreneur.
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