While other ice fisherman may shrug off the occasional lost fish, UW-Madison students Nicholas Passint, Joe Cessna and Bryan Wilson are determined to stop telling stories about \the one that got away.""
The students' invention, a retractable net that can fold like an upside down umbrella, enter an ice fishing hole and open and close again around any fish that nears the hole, won them $10,000 Friday at UW-Madison's 10th annual Innovation Days.
""I just realized I've lost a lot of fish close to the hole,"" Passint said about how he and his partners were inspired to invent the Ice Net X.
Passint, Cessna and Wilson are three of more than 45 UW-Madison students who brought their inventions to the competition Thursday and Friday at the College of Engineering.
Judges awarded more than $14,000 in prizes in addition to the largest prize of $10,000 awarded to Passint, Cessna and Wilson.
UW-Madison alumni Richard Schoofs and Peter Tong sponsor the Innovation Day prizes every year to celebrate Thomas Edison's birthday.
This year, students produced a wide range of inventions, including inventions aimed at helping improve the environment such as an automobile engine designed to run on and create hydrogen using sugar-based alcohols, inventions that make life more convenient like the tub faucet that automatically turns off after a specified length of time, and inventions that simply make life a bit more exciting like the water ballista designed to launch a person up to 30 feet above a lake.
The Innovation Day competition encourages students to apply what they have learned in school to real life problems and personal interests.
""It's fun to kind of use the skills that we learned to apply to something we really enjoy,"" said Brian Burger, one of two recent graduates who invented the Disc Finder, an invention that helps disc golfers find lost discs. ""You spend a lot of time in school doing stuff maybe you don't really enjoy that much, so we decided to take up a challenging project we really wanted to do.""
Many of the contestants who enter the Innovation Day competition are engineering students, but all students are welcome participate.
""We're always trying to get students from other areas on campus,"" said Jim Beal, Director of Engineer External Relations. ""Students often have some of the best ideas they're going to have while they're in school but they don't often get the chance to ... chase that dream or develop that product.\
