Tiny Inventors in a New World
A nine-year-old girl from Memphis named Harper asked James Jorasch, the founder of Science House, to talk to her class today about inventing.
What is an inventor?
It’s a person who takes risks, tries new things and challenges themselves.
“People love to complain,” James told them. “Inventors find problems to solve. An inventor thinks — what can I do to make things better? Inventing is a world where you use imagination and creativity. You bounce ideas around with your friends. You solve problems that people have.”
A lot of inventing, James said, is taking two things that are very different and bringing them together. This is the essence of creativity — reading, talking to people and learning.
If you come up with an invention and someone thinks the idea isn’t good, your invention is still better than their complaint.
Nothing is ever good enough, he said. You can always improve it.
You have to learn all the time. Inventing isn’t a lightning strike.
In a patent, you have to describe your invention.
Is your invention “novel and non-obvious?”
Identify a problem. Ideas start coming.
Don’t stop when you come up with one solution. Keep going.
The more you learn, the better an inventor you’ll be.
His father was an engineer and entrepreneur. “He taught me about business,” James said. “He taught me that you solve problems for your customers.”
His mother was a math teacher. James loves math, and applied his love of solving math problems to inventing.
“Yow can own your own ideas,” he said. “You can work for other people, but you don’t have to.”
Some of the kids sketched ideas for their inventions and held their whiteboards up on screen, and in that instant, despite being at the epicenter of a pandemic in Manhattan, I could see the future.
