The national spotlight was on an Avon home-schooled student's award-winning invention Friday when he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show's latest segment of "Kid Inventors."
Fourth-grader Falcon Yule, 9, won the Connecticut Science Fair Award at the Connecticut Invention Convention in Hartford last April – and an HD video camera – for his timed frog feeder invention.
The mechanism, made of legos, can dispense food pellets once a night for up to 13 days to feed his aquatic African frogs, Bugcatch and Hopper during family vacations.
“Basically I went away on vacation to Florida and I had to have my aunt take care of my frogs for me," Yule said. "I doubt that was exactly a vacation for her, so I decided I’d make the timed frog feeder so I could stop bugging her.”
Producers from The Ellen DeGeneres Show called the Yules several weeks ago to invite Falcon on the show. A media representative from the Connecticut Invention Convention had sent the show Falcon's video of his invention, according to his father, Richard Yule.
“We all were enthusiastic. It was a good experience and he had a lot of fun," Richard Yule said.
Falcon was the first of three kids to demonstrate what the talk show dubbed the "frog buffet." A fabric frog stood in for Bugcatch and Hopper, who did not travel with him to California, and he used ice cream sprinkles to represent the food pellets dispensed into the frog habitat.
"They aren't good enough for my real live frogs, but they are good enough for the fake frogs..." he quipped on the show, getting a laugh from the audience.
A motor-powered conveyer belt moves the superglued Lego studs along to dispense the food pellets into the frog habitat every time it receives an automated signal from the yellow control box, Falcon told Ellen DeGeneres.
"That's a great invention. That's a fantastic thing," Ellen told him on the segment.
The Yules bought a frog-growing kit when Falcon was younger because he wanted frogs. Bugcatch and Hopper are about 4 years old now and are important to Falcon as pets.
The Yules have used Falcon's timed frog feeder while they were away on trips to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New York.
And it worked because, as Falcon put it, “My frogs aren’t dead.”
Falcon, who attended Avon's Talcott Mountain Academy of Science, Mathematics & Technology in second grade has otherwise been home-schooled.
He gives this advice to other kid inventors.
“Make something to solve a new kind of problem sort of like mine," Falcon said.
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