Playing with sunglasses inspires girl to create award-winning 3D board game
While playing with polarised sunglasses, Abbie Milner, 10, noticed she could see through two sunglasses stacked on top of one another, but when she turned one of them perpendicular to the other, the stacked lenses darkened completely.
After researching polarised light, the Primary 4 pupil at Raffles Girls’ Primary School was inspired to create a two-player board game, similar to tic-tac-toe. Instead of drawing noughts and crosses, players form a continuous line across a board of 36 squares with darkened squares to win.
To flesh out her idea, her father taught her to design and 3D print the board and square pieces to hold polarised film sheets.
Three prototypes later, the board game – which Abbie named Abadu – won first place in the Whizkid category for upper primary pupils of the 2022 Sony Creative Science Award on Tuesday.
This year marks the 25th edition of this toy-making competition, jointly organised by Science Centre Singapore and the Sony Group of Companies, and supported by the Ministry of Education.
The largest toy-making competition in Singapore for primary school pupils, it encourages inventions that apply science, technology, engineering and mathematics principles.
“I can be creative and bring my ideas to life, so even when it seems very far-fetched, I can put my ideas on paper and draft it into a prototype,” Abbie said.
Since its inception, the competition has garnered over 80,000 toy entries from more than 100,000 pupils. This year, more than 4,700 children from 97 primary schools submitted 3,861 toys.
For their inventions, 33 students aged seven to 12 received awards in the Junior Whizkid and Whizkid categories for lower and upper primary pupils respectively.
National Development Minister Desmond Lee said at the awards ceremony: “Today, it’s a toy. But tomorrow, they will invent things we would have never thought of to solve problems that we face today.”
Dylan Lee, who took second place in the Whizkid category, made use of the science concept behind a see-saw to create his Marble Maze. Using toothpicks to balance a cardboard box maze, he created a puzzle that can be tilted up or down in four directions to move a marble in the box.
The Primary 5 Woodlands Primary pupil, 11, who has been building Legos since he was in Kindergarten 2 and owns nearly 40 Lego sets, dreams of becoming a Lego designer.
The joint third-place winners were Ty Chia, 12, from Kong Hwa School and Renee Lai, 9, from Haig Girls’ School.
Ty’s game uses magnetic force to propel a magnetic ball forward to hit a pellet onto a scoreboard, while Renee used recycled items such as compact discs and plastic bottles to create musical instruments.
The top two winners in the Whizkid category received a $1000 Sony product voucher, while the joint third-place winners received a $500 Sony product voucher.
Ms Mary Shi, 37, a science teacher who mentored Renee, said Renee had tried again this year after failing to be shortlisted in 2021.
“For us as teachers, we are heartened to see the children show resilience and perseverance,” she said. “We want to encourage students to apply science and learn beyond the textbook.”
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