Jason with his co-advisor Mitch Tuinstra
Jason competed in the Purdue University Corn and Soybean Innovation Competition this year, and Miss Emma and I got to attend the awards banquet in Indianapolis earlier this week to see if Jason's team won the $20,000 first place prize. Leah and Adam stayed home with Alexa the babysitter, who, according to Leah, is "almost as fancy as Auntie Allison and Auntie Jenny... almost".
The dinner was fancy and the venue was beautiful and thank goodness Emma was well-behaved, but my favorite thing to see was Jason working the crowds to earn the "People's Choice" Award for best invention.
His team created a corn-product-based waterproof protectant that can be applied to small electronic devices and keeps them working underwater. They sent texts to phones that were sitting in bowls of water. They had an iPod playing music
underwater for the two hour duration of the dinner. Pretty slick, I'd say.
The grand prize went to a make-up product team (robbed, I tell you. He was robbed. Would you really put corn make-up on your face?) The runner-up was the football helmet padding team. And Team Aquaverto? Thanks in no small part to Jason's equal parts salesman, entrepreneur and genius, they took the People's Choice award. Each member of the team was given an iPad... Yay! Now we'll have one to keep after graduation when Jason has to relinquish the lab iPad that he has lovingly adopted.
If you want to check out the product in action,
go here. And who knows? Maybe we'll make millions off of it some day!
2 comments:
Congrats, that is exciting! My phone is at this moment sitting in a bowl of rice & praying it will come alive after being dunked in water so we would sure buy that product!!!!! (This is our 3rd phone in a year to be dunked & ruined)
Tell Jason, Aaron thinks this is a great idea!
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