For his most recent project, 13-year-old Chase Lewis was moved to put his scientific mind to work by a story that pulled at his heart.
His mother read aloud a news article about the 2011 famine in Somalia that said parents were having to leave their kids by the roadside to die if they couldn't make the 2-to-3-week walk to a refugee camp.
"I was just floored by it," he said. "It sounds horrible that they should have to do this. And as I thought about it, my mind wandered to the travois, an invention of the Native American Plains Indians."
Parents could use a modernized travois, Chase thought, to carry children along the route. So he developed a prototype, a cloth-covered net stretched on a triangular frame mounted on two wheels that can easily be pulled by one person.
