SAN DIEGO — 12-year-old Oliver Cottrell invented the automatic hockey puck passing machine. The La Jolla Country Day School seventh grader combined his love for hockey and mechanical engineering to create his project.
Oliver spent six months researching and building his invention. Its a machine that shoots hockey pucks out to the player when practicing. It has two modes, random fire and camera fire.
"Random fire allows the machine to shoot pucks in two random locations for the tests, and for camera fire it allows the machine to track the player and fire two pucks at their location," Oliver said.
There is a test mode that fires two pucks out and an automatic mode that fires ten. He showed me how the machine works.
"So the motors are inside of these boxes, along with the wheels that are shown outside of them that are attached to the motors. This is a rack and pinion, this pushes the pucks into the wheels, and then this is the puck holder, which stores the pucks and is magnetically attached to my projects," Oliver said.
Oliver and his invention are headed to Washington D.C. at the end of October as a top thirty finalist in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenger. It's a top STEM research competition for middle schoolers. Oliver said he's nervous but thinks he'll be able to do his best.
"If I win, I would get a numerous amount of knowledge and of STEM and science," he said. "Not only will I get that, but I will win $25,000."
Both Oliver and the automatic hockey puck pass machine have a bright future ahead.
"In the future, I think I'll produce it to where it could be used at home for hockey players and other sports," Oliver said.