This year’s 3^rd edition of the Young Inventors contest saw its winners – 16-year-old Dimitar Rangelov and 17-year-old Stefan Rachev, students at the John Atanasoff Professional High School in Sofia. The Minu Balkanski Foundation is the organizer of the contest with the participation of the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce. The event aims at bringing back to life the interest of young people towards science.

Both young fellows won the contest with three inventions – an autonomous cart, an innovative school bell and a cap counting device. Two of these inventions have already been practically implemented – the smart school bell has been working at the professional high school, where the young inventors study, as of February. At the same time the cap counter has being used at a company’s industrial unit in the town of Pernik for the production of soft drinks.

Dimitar and Stefan give more details on their projects in a somehow simultaneous manner:

“The autonomous cart has two infrared sensors and a sonar one. The first two help the machine to avoid hurdles. The cart can be used to aid visually impaired people, as the sensors map the coming terrain and mark holes, bumps, pillars etc. The appliance can lead the person, prompting wherever there is unevenness or any other problem of that kind,” says Stefan. “Our second project is for a school bell that is now used at our school. It has different timetables and is semi-autonomous. It has to be switched on whenever it is placed. The security guard has nothing to do from this moment on. Thus we avoid the purely human mistake – delays, early ringing, forgetting to ring the bell etc."

The third project is a cap counting device. It has been used at a beverage company for a couple of months now. The thing counts the caps and calculates via this algorithm the quantity that needs to be placed in the bottles and also how many bottles should be there. It has its industrial usage, but we haven’t patented it yet. The company had applied for such a machine, we asked them what they wanted and whether we can do it,” Dimitar explains.

The contest winners receive technical appliance, in order to further develop their projects and to use it for the improvement of their current inventions, along with the creation of new ones. The young people have other ideas for the future. They hope that the award will allow them to design a piece of appliance, preventing road accidents.

Ilian Iliev from the Plovdiv Language High School and Konstantin Dimitrov from the Tsanko Tserkovski High School in Polski Trambesh shared the second place at the contest for their projects in the sphere of robotics and automatics.

Denislav Kirilov, Melani Evtimova and Daniel Velinov from the town of Kyustendil were ranked third. The subject of their project was the usage of fluorescent light at microscopic surveys of soils. The method traces the ecological changes in soils and sediments.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev