A tale of glory and courage

By Hiyal Biyagamage

Every parent at the grand awards ceremony was on the edge of their seat. All they wanted to hear was the name of their son or daughter being announced by the compere and they were ready to unleash their happiness by screaming at the top of their voices. Flags were waving and the whole atmosphere at the Phoenix Convention Centre was buzzing with joy and excitement.

The team from Sri Lanka for this year’s Intel ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) was indeed small. The Sri Lankan cheering squad for the three finalists only had five members. But they never felt like minnows amongst the giant representation of other countrymen and women. Their hopes were alive with the Sri Lankan flag at a side, ready to be waved. The whole team knew that Sri Lankan students had done amazingly well at the final stage with many positive remarks and praising for their solutions. So the little team waited, at the edge of their seats, impatiently. 

A crutch with a cause

At the age of eight, Chamindu Jayasanka did not know anything about competitions but he was innovating. For his friends, Chamindu was their last resort to fix broken stuff, including their favourite remote-controlled cars. Chamindu’s parents took notice that their son has a keen eye for devising new gadgets out of nothing. He comes from a humble family in Bomiriya and his parents had no luxury to provide fancy toys or cool gadgets for him but they never discouraged his interests. 

Being a teacher who is in-charge of new inventions in a local school, Chamindu’s father encouraged his son to be more practical in inventing, developing solutions for the greater good and provided all the little knowledge he had. Coming of age, this fatherly wisdom helped him to clinch many awards at school and national level competitions and at the back of his mind, a new thought was blossoming: An invention to showcase in an international competition.

One morning, he was waiting in the bus stand to catch the next bus to his school, Hanwella Rajasinghe Central College. There, he saw a man in crutches and noticed the strain he was undergoing. He had no place to sit so all the time; he was standing with his full weight on the crutches. The whole experience, according to Chamindu, was painful and uneasy for him. “This incident made me think of all the people who use crutches and their painful experience. A very practical idea came to mind instantly. I went home and drew a couple of prototypes. I worked on a couple of prototypes to identify the drawbacks and how to make it more user-friendly. The final product needed a lot of hard work and time but it came out pretty neat,” said Chamindu.

His solution ‘Modified and Adjustable Crutches’ comes with an integrated seat attached to the crutch. This facility gives the disabled person a chance to use his crutch as a chair and sit anywhere whenever he feels uncomfortable. The seat can sustain a weight of 100 kilograms. The pair of crutches is also height-adjustable so that disable people will not have to strain their entire body weight on the crutches to sit on a chair or a commode. This invention helped him to become Sri Lanka’s junior inventor in 2015 at the Junior Inventor of the Year (JIY) competition, organised by the Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL). His dream of taking part in an international competition came true when his father came and told him he had secured a place at Intel ISEF in Arizona, after taking part in Sri Lanka Science and Engineering Fair 2016.

“I was having my breakfast and when my father told me about my win, I nearly choked,” a beaming Chamindu told me. “All I wanted was to take part in a global competition and I never thought a pair of crutches would bring me that luck.”

To fill a great void with electronics

Abishekh Gomes’ father leads a very successful business of his own now. The progression of his career however was not a bed of roses. He struggled when he was growing up and when he was young, he found so many hardships and plenty of barriers were blocking his path. At a tough time of his life, a surprising companion came to his aid: a deaf person. This person, who was a good friend of Abishekh’s father, started helping him out to build his career by providing him shelter and money. Gradually, they became inseparable, helping each other out in different capacities.

Abishekh, a grade 10 student from Belvoir International School Colombo, remembers the day his father brought his special friend to their house. “My father introduced us to this person who was speech-impaired and I came to know that he had helped my father a lot when he was young. He was a rich guy with a wealthy background at that time but when he came to our place, he was in a bad shape. His family members were gone and he had not much money in his hands. The thing I noticed was the way he tried to communicate with me and my mother. We didn’t know how to communicate with him and he found it really hard to communicate with us to ask for a glass of water,” he reminisced. 

From a small age, Abishekh was playing with circuit boards and without anyone’s guidance; he could design a circuit board for an anti-burglar alarm system or a single chip FM transmitter by the age of 13. He looked at resolving the communication gap he experienced using electronics. The glove, a wearable device he designed to convert American Sign Language (ASL) into English has a custom-made circuit board, a Bluetooth module and flex sensors. His custom-made circuit board has an Integrated Circuit (IC) with predefined letters and words which allows automated translation. When a user operates his device, finger placements of the user will be identified and match with the predefined values. If they match, data will be transmitted and displayed wirelessly onto a smartphone application. This invention paved him the way to participate in this year’s Intel ISEF after he won the third place at JIY competition. Notably, no one helped him to build this: he was his own mentor.

“It takes 215 milliseconds to communicate a word or a phrase from the glove to the smartphone application. My next target is to reduce the size – the size of a bracelet where it could connect to the nerves of your hand. I guess it’s not impossible,” Abishekh dreams. Yes, there is a saying ‘nothing’s impossible’.

A not so common hobby

Lochana Piyumantha confessed that he was not a smart kid at the start. “I scored less than 100 marks in my Grade 5 Scholarship Examination,” said Lochana with a light expression. “I wasn’t much interested in studies, I didn’t care for anything.” But something changed his mind completely when he entered grade six. 

“I had a chance to visit our school science laboratory when I was in grade six and I was awed by its appearance. It was so clean, neat and well-organised. The aura of the lab invited me to learn, explore and love science as I do now. When I joined Madampe Senanayake Central College, my science teacher made me fall in love with science. Falling in love with science gave my brain a very important message which said ‘the right time has come to seriously think about your education’. By the end of grade nine, I had almost completed the local advanced level chemistry syllabus,” Lochana who will be facing his advanced level exams next year told me. Lochana has found a nanotechnology-based solution for resistant endometrial cancer cells. It is a type of cancer that begins in the lining of the womb. In his solution, he has used Ellagic acid in berries and iron oxide nanoparticles which create an anti-cancer agent for endometrial cancer cells. During his study, he had done a number of complex studies and analysis which requires the knowledge level of a PhD student.

“This was such a daunting task and it wasn’t easy for a student like me who is out of Colombo to find material to support my research. I never gave up though. There were so many people to back me and surprisingly, they had faith on my research. 

Colombo Medical College, Medical Research Institute, Prof. Kamani Tennakoon from Institute of Biochemistry Molecular Biology and Biotechnology who is a past pupil of my school, Dr. Sameera Smarakoon from the University of Colombo who questioned my knowledge for hours and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are a few resources who helped me to pursue this dream. Doing research has been my hobby since grade seven. Bit of an uncommon hobby, isn’t it?” Lochana said casually.

Lochana was selected from NSF’s coveted Science Research Project Competition (SRPC) to represent Sri Lanka at the Intel ISEF. He wants to study further in a foreign university but come back again and serve Sri Lanka. For the first time, Lochana had a serious face at the end of our chat. “I am a researcher, not an inventor,” he told me and rushed into the grand awards ceremony. He was bit late.  Every time the compere announced a name of a Sri Lankan finalist, the small cheering squad at the back of the Intel ISEF Grand Awards ceremony was screaming non-stop and full of joy, waving the lion flag chanting ‘Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka’. Looking at this jubilation, many others joined their celebrations and cheered for the three whiz kids from Sri Lanka who pushed the envelope in medical innovations at Intel ISEF, world’s biggest stage for young inventors and according to Locahana, researchers.