Sometimes, one inspiring moment can lead to be creation of a beautiful thing. For Ann Makosinski, that moment came during her trip to the Philippines with her mother. And ever since that moment, Ann has only been moving forward when it comes to inventions.
A passion for creation
Ann was born on October 3, 1977, in Victoria, British Coloumbia, Canada. Growing up, Ann loved creating things, an interest she has been nurturing since she was seven. She would make things with a hot glue gun and stuff she found around her home. She knew her inventions might not work, but she was captivated by the idea of piecing things together and creating new things.
Ann wasn’t given many toys, so she began making her own. Her first toy was a box of transistors.
The Hollow Flashlight
During one of her trips to the Philippines, Ann met her friends, who told her that they were unable to perform well at school as they didn’t have enough daylight hours to study. They would often have no electricity in the night.
Ann, who was then a high school student at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, decided to apply whatever she had learned about energy-harvesting materials through her experiments to come up with an invention – the Hollow Flashlight.
Energy-harvesting is the process where energy generated by body heat, movements, etc. Are captured and converted to obtain relatively small levels of power.
Ann used this technique to create a flashlight that would power itself from the heat generated by the human body, especially the hand that holds the light.
Ann tested her invention and found that the light from her flashlight shone brighter as the outside air got colder, since the body generates more heat when exposed to cold. However, even in warmer conditions, her flashlight managed to sustain a strong beam of light for more that 20 minutes.
In 2014, when she was 16, Ann registered the flashlight for the Google Science Fair and won the top prize in her age category.
Ann also won the gold medal and the Energy Award at the Canada-Wide Science Fair International Science and Engineering Fair for her invention.
Her next invention was a mug that harvests the excess heat from a hot drink while it cools down, and converts it into electricity. The invention, called e-Drink also won several awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
Creating toys for education
In 2017, when Ann was on an expedition to northern Canada, she found a beach encrusted with trash of burnt plastic, glass, compost and batteries.
Ann was startled by what she saw. She wanted to play a part in protecting the environment, and the following year, at her workspace in Victoria, Ann came up with an idea.
Ann started working on toy to teach kids about renewable energy.
The brightly coloured, cute toys make sounds, spin or light up when they are sun or wound they are underwater, placed in the sun or wound up – demonstrating different ways of generating power.
Ann hopes to bring out the toys in the market sometime this year and eventually hire a team of metallurgists and engineers to work on scaling the energy-harvesting technology to bring the Hollow Flashlight to the public.
Ann founded her own company, Makotronics Enterprises Inc. In 2016, and is currently pursuing a degree English Literature from the University of Victoria Canada.
What makes her special?
Her passion for invention and a go-getter attitude. Ann kept piecing together different things and conducting experiments. When she noticed problems such as the lack of electricity and environmental pollution, she was quick to use her skills and devise ways to tackle the issue through her inventions.
Did you know?
According to an article published in CNN, Ann turned down an engineering scholarship and pursued a degree in arts instead. This interest in arts is said to have led her to a more imaginative way of using her thermoelectric technology.
Picture Credit : Google
