By Kristen Friesen
For The Independent

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, hold on to your hat! Solutions for all those problems and more were presented Tuesday in Kearney by area first- through eighth-graders at Educational Service Unit 10's ninth annual Regional Invention Convention.

Paula Mellinger, staff developer for ESU 10, brought the Invention Convention to Kearney when she began working there in 1999. Mellinger previously worked at ESU 9 in Hastings, where a Regional Invention Convention has been in full swing for 20 years. A third site for the uniquely Central Nebraskan convention is Holdrege.

Kearney's Invention Convention is open to all students in Blaine, Buffalo, Custer, Dawson, Garfield, Greeley, Hall, Howard, Loup, Merrick, Sherman and Valley counties. And because each school may send only five inventions, that makes for some stiff competition.

This year, the Grand Island public schools made promotion of the Invention Convention the responsibility of its integration specialists. Deanna Hirschman, integration specialist for Gates Elementary, began working alongside teachers in the classrooms as early as October, plugging the convention within the context of existing science and language arts curricula.

Once students expressed an interest, Hirschman met with them and asked them to come up with a problem.

"'What bugs you?' I asked them," Hirschman said.

The inventions themselves took shape as students came up with ideas to solve those problems and spent considerable time fine-tuning those ideas.

But the hardest part for Hirschman was choosing just five inventions to represent Gates out of the 12 finished products.

"Last year, it (the convention) almost brought me to tears," Hirschman said. "It's so neat to see them have an idea and come up with a display and present it to someone. It's really a memorable experience for them. This year is the most (participants) we've ever had. It was a hard, hard decision."

And as more new inventors participate in the convention each year and others return, the inventions themselves just get better and better, Mellinger said.

"It (Invention Convention) really lends itself to the development of the creative side of kids," she said. "We try to make the experience like that of a real inventor."

Grand Island mom Danielle Kneeland was there with two of her children, Bryce (an eighth-grader) and Kenzie (a fifth-grader). While Bryce has taken second place in the competition the past two years, Kenzie was participating for the first time as Shoemaker's first representative.

"It gets them thinking how they can help other people, because that's the whole purpose of the thing," Danielle Kneeland said. "It teaches them organization, too. Anything to get the kids' brains working."

Bryce Kneeland passed this bit of advice to younger students or those participating for the first time: "Just don't be nervous. Talk to the judges like you would to anyone else."

The final inventions were judged in four areas: the novelty of the invention, its usefulness, the appearance of the invention and display, and the presentation of the invention to the judges. And, while the judges deliberated, participants were entertained by the Edgerton Explorit Center's Rick Brown.