Part 1 of a visionary

As told by Lydia Denton, inventor

Part 1 of a 2 part series

I live in a small town in eastern North Carolina. Tobacco and cotton fields line the two-lane roads that lead to my school. It's a five minute drive to get anywhere in the city and the only four lane roads are Target and Walmart. Living in such a rural place, it's hard to imagine that my big ideas could ever escape the walls of my classroom, much less end up in the hands of scientists.

I think most of the kids I've met feel the same way. Children's ideas don't matter. Children's ideas cannot make a difference. Nobody wants to listen to children's ideas. I'm just a kid.

I'm grateful for the teachers who dreamed big for me before me: those who noticed a curious 7-year-old dismantling musical birthday cards, enthusiastically taking apart computer towers to discover how wires and plastic created the magic I saw on the screen. and the girl who asked for duct tape, K'nex, Legos and a soldering iron for her birthday.

I remember seeing Miss America makes toothpaste for elephants on YouTube using my mom's phone. Every day I watched my mom get up in front of classrooms full of elementary and middle school children and teach them to love science. almost as much as her. I went through her journal from college and saw images of 3D-rendered cat scans, pages of code, and diagrams of heart valves that she worked on in grad school. My role model sleeps in the bedroom down the hall and makes sure I know that small-town kids have great ideas and they are worth sharing.

In the last eight years my identity has changed. I'm not just a child anymore, I'm a child inventor. I made my first invention in 2North Dakota grade: a cabinet designed to protect my precious Halloween candy from my older brother. He enthusiastically drew inventions and entered them in children's inventor contests every year.

After drawing hundreds of ideas, I moved on to prototyping. Tape, cardboard, glue, craft supplies – my inventions didn't work, but getting them off the page and into my hands made a big difference. in 5th degree I started soldering cables, batteries, resistors, sensors and capacitors. I begged my older brother to teach me how to program an Arduino. (Arduino boards are capable of reading inputs (light on a sensor, a finger, button) and converting them into an output (activating a motor, turning on an LED, etc.) and after more than 100 failures, I succeeded with my first functional invention: a Car seat to prevent deaths in hot cars.

It has been five years since I successfully developed the Beats the heat of the car seat and four years since CITGO Fueling Education awarded it the grand prize in its competition. Then came a whirlwind of interviews with the BBC, people magazine, Good Morning America, a Danish newspaper, a Russian children's magazine… all done via Zoom during the pandemic. Sometimes I felt like an observer of my own life! My ideas reached far beyond the classroom or the walls of my small town. I was a 10-year-old girl sharing my ideas around the world, on TV and on Zoom live in countries around the world. People wanted to hear my ideas!

Prepare to be inspired as we eagerly await part two of Lydia's incredible journey, where her limitless imagination continues to generate inventive solutions to real-world dilemmas.

*Photos courtesy of Lydia Denton. Do not reuse without permission.