- Make48 is funded by... - Stanley Black and Decker.

Provides tools and services around the globe to help turn great ideas into reality.

And to help us shape the world we live in.

We proudly support programming that inspires invention, innovation and hard work.

Together with Make48, we're providing men and women, the tools and resources to build a better world.

Stanley Black and Decker, for those who make the world.

- Previously on Make48... - Welcome Make48 finalists.

- "Audience applauding" Wichita, Madison, Indie, and Hartford, welcome.

- The teams were given a product category: Steam toys, and 48 hours.

- The specific area in which you'll be innovating this weekend is steam toys.

Two, one, Make48!

"(loud air horn)" - Coming up on this episode, the teams brainstorm ideas and meet with the patent attorneys.

This is Make48.

Everyone's got a big idea.

(upbeat music) - I was really excited when I heard the prompts, because I think it's gonna be really fun and I'm huge advocate for steam and just like having children start to get into steam sooner.

So I was super excited to hear about that category.

- Back to your organizations, so you thinking like conveyor belts or something, that's kinda a teach em box.

Like those it's like remote controlled like factory or like construction stuff.

I used to be obsessed with that.

- Efficiency and optimization.

I'm trying to think of how drop different shapes into this machine and it sorts it out.

- Had, it had like a, it had two different size balls, one with like red and blue.

And you had you ran it through, almost like a SIV that would separate it.

- Yeah.

- I kind of think it might be difficult cause there's a lot of stuff that's already been done with toys.

So, but coming up with something new is gonna be tough - Imagining, you know, you use your app, you have something, some like grid, paper thing, some, you know, toy where you're, you're doing some sort of drawing or maybe building stuff in this space.

And then that is converted into augmented reality.

Yeah.

In a way that, you know, could be fun, branded what not.

- Well, I like the idea, like you mentioned there, Johnny about having, having AR and, Something in the app space that interacts with the physical to, I think that's a good avenue.

- Well, at the beginning stages, it's real simple.

You know, the teams, there's a lot of deer in the headlights, you know, and people, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?

Some people there, they got it.

And they know exactly what they're gonna do.

- I think one thing that we're worried about in getting into this category of toys, where we were in games before is not leaning into our previous builds or our previous ideas and really starting from scratch to understand, okay, what is a toy and how do we keep it in that category?

- We, can do something like cooking with food.

- Yeah.

That plates.

- A little bit.

- Harder.

A kid.

- I think the biggest thing was hands on.

Right?

I like to see the concepts.

I was big into taking things apart and understanding why they broken down so you can bring back together.

So that was what sparked my interest in mechanical.

So if there's a way that you can incorporate assembly disassembly that bring the concept home, I think that's important.

- So I think next step is really, it's a start narrowing, narrowing, everything down.

- The category was so broad yet specific that, you know, there was a lot of very, there was a lot of struggle in the brainstorming session.

- It's a little bit, little bit daunting, a little overwhelming, but it's not out of our wheelhouse.

I don't think, I think it's something that we've all got some background in, in some form of, of that kind of education.

And I think the daunting thing to me is just how wide open that space really is.

- We're trying to think of some sort of a lighting panel or like customizable L E D that could go into a hospital setting and kids could use color tiles and kind of add and subtract different colors to create new colors and then kind of build from it as they're, you know, as they, they stay in the room and it kind of brings a little bit more vibrance, warmer color to the room and something that they can kind of learn from.

And I don't know, give it the, give the space, its own personal vibe.

I think that lighting can do a lot into a room.

So being able to let the kids learn through that would be.

- You know, you have 48 hours to get this project done, but that's not the whole 48.

You know, it's just like, there's a certain amount of time that you can dedicate to brainstorming.

So when you have something that's very broad, you know, it's hard to narrow it down.

So because you gotta start building soon and then you have meetings with the patent attorney and focus groups and other things.

So it's really not a whole 48 hours.

That's just a fraction of it.

You know, that, that you have to really come up with your idea.

- And then what's the cylindrical or the more like 3D one that you were thinking would like.

- So we had to just a base with a, like a soft L E D ball in the middle and you built up some kind of tiles around it.

You would see the light come out of those tiles and you could build a cylinder square, whatever shape.

So then you could potentially layer on colors on top of it.

- We are hoping to make something that will help us to communicate with the children that are sick.

We don't know what to go between would be.

We're working on a couple of ideas that will Be able to bridge the gap.

We've got so many things out there in the Using technology, but We've come up with a few ideas.

- Let's say we have this, we have this bear, right.

We have a bear and we have some sort of screen in it So that you can get messages from your Loved ones for can't visit you For people in the hospital.

- I heard toy immediately.

I said, well, toys don't allow me to use my powers for good.

That's sort of neutral.

And so I was not necessarily excited About the idea, but I think there were Others on our team that were excited about a toy.

- I agreed with Dr. Hicks that, you know, I would've liked to do something for good.

And then we heard that it had, we could help with the hospital and sick kids.

And that really brought us back to excitement.

Again, we're helping people again, We're solving issues that need to be solved and not just Doing a neutral thing, But we're actually helping kids who desperately need it to Be happier and be healthier.

- Is there anything else we could could add to it?

- Well, if we look at the, the tick box we have, we have steam.

Steam is incorporated in our education games.

We have the toy part, the fun games.

We're helping kids out by not only the fun games, the, you know, the bear, the whatever, but we also have these video messages to make them feel better.

I think we've ticked the tick box.

I mean, we can easily get the price between under $79 in between 30.

That can't be hard.

I mean, computer like little computer cartridges are going, you know, like those games, little games that have computer screens are going for like 40 bucks.

I don't see why we couldn't make a little more complex and add 20 bucks onto the price.

- You gotta be in love with your idea to really push it.

You know, I've seen teams that were kind of, you know, and it shows in their presentation, but you know, when someone's like, they're passionate about their idea you that comes through in their presentations, especially.

"(upbeat music)" - It's so broad, man, you know, everything's been done.

It's hard to be original.

It's it is a tough one.

Yeah.

It's really hard.

- Really tough.

- I can't believe we came up with water reclamation faster than a good toy.

- So what I'm picturing is like you end up with sort of a Sculpture that has some songs you could look.

- Oh yeah.

- Every single time it wouldn't necessarily be unique.

So it couldn't be.

- Yeah.

So the idea of blocks that have tonal value, like audible tone and you stack them up and you kind of make a sculpture out of these blocks and then you get to hear what your sculpture, what does that sculpture sound like?

- It's interesting.

Let Lego launch last year.

They're saying, I think it's called visio, but it's.

- Video?

- Yeah, video.

- And it's like how you would construct.

- Video from it.

- From my perception.

- Yeah, it's, it's unlocked a new area, which is interesting.

It does use like kind of an AR sensor on it, But it's interesting just looking at where do you think that They didn't hit it right, And maybe try and improve on that.

Cause it sounds like it's similar.

There's like building blocks to create something.

- Right.

- You can try and look at that as a product and say, oh, we could improve it in this way.

- Okay.

That's why I think it's not working.

- But you need a real, wow.

This is the TV show.

We need to get that.

Where's the excitement.

How are you gonna get everyone in the room to be like, oh, That's cool.

- We wanna see you guys doing like air guitar.

You know?

Like that's what kids like, think when you think about music, it's like, I wanna be all the beat dropping, you know, there's those moments.

So I can imagine you guys got into a band because you wanna stand on stage and like rock out.

Right.

That's what the same thing with toys.

You're trying to like, I know emulate something or you're trying to.

Like, let's analyze something.

Look, you should look up and look, we've got computers here, go on Amazon.

See where the biggest selling music toys are.

Right.

Then the big successes in the industry.

Like the last big musical success I would say is like paper jams.

- Yeah.

From WowWee about 10 years ago.

And that was all over the place.

Right.

Where they failed was their extensions.

Nobody bought the amps and nobody bought the other stuff, put the whole line out of business.

So your extensions are just as important as you're main product.

- Yeah.

- We're still working.

- Yeah.

- We had, we had an idea.

We were pretty hot on and after talking just some of the mentors here, we kind of got shot down and now we're a little bruised.

I don't know if we're gonna get rid of this idea or not yet.

We, we might say the heck with it, do it anyway.

- Dropping knowledge bombs here.

- But they're not smiling.

I feel like we are in the wrong direction.

- All right teams, we are two hours into the competition.

Ideas are flowing.

Now it is time for each of you to find out if that idea is still good for you with the patent attorneys, you'll have 15 minutes with Andrea and Chris to go over your ideas you have so far and you'll have another 46 hours after that to keep going.

- In order to have something patentable, three things have to happen.

The invention needs to be useful and solve a problem.

It needs to be novel or new.

And then when we get into that obvious standard, you wanna make sure that it's not something that you're just changing the color, the size, the shape so that you can have something that's patentable.

But what we're seeing today is that everyone may not have a patentable idea, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not marketable.

- So I'm thinking like hospital, what can the child?

And from there, the first idea was how to package something.

And then we thought tiles.

Then we thought games.

- Hypothetically, there's a game called 24.

That's just number parts that have like four numbers on them.

If we were to do like, even something like 20, like even if we were to do tiles with a selection of just like random tiles that then multi add divide or subtract to 24, is that more or less the same thing?

- When I Google sort of just math tile games.

They're hundreds of, yeah.

You take this exact game and copy the rules and say, you know what?

In the hospital, the cards tear and have germs.

So we're gonna make it a towel.

That's to me seems to be copyright.

- They, they have several copyrights filed on, on various uses of that game.

I think for people at home watching this, they will hopefully understand that, you know, infringements the biggest issue that they've wanted to know, first of all, if they've got a product that's going to infringe somebody else, they just need to stop and start it over right away.

And I think that's the biggest hurdle from the teams initially, because once you get past that issue, like she was saying, there are plenty of ways to protect your idea.

If not patent than otherwise.

"(upbeat music)" - In the engineering field, there is a competition that's well known about building a bridge with Popsicle sticks and glue.

And you glue that and try to, with hold the maximum weight.

So we like that idea and bring that to a toy and gamify that too.

And the idea is a, a train or a load is coming in five minutes.

For example, there is a, a timer.

If the kid cannot design a bridge that withstand that load, you're gonna fall and you lose, you also can play against other people.

And for that, you have like a deck of cards, for example, and you pull that and may say, oh, you can steal one part of your opponent.

Or it can't say you cannot use certain size of material.

- Are you drawing any inspiration from any particular games with the cards?

Like, are you thinking on something that you played already or - No, not really - Just coming out loud.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

I would encourage you to just think of some of those games and like what made the card aspect of that exciting think of like games like UNO, like reverse or like, you know, you think you got him and then he, he gets you back with something.

- Right.

So how do you make the game, the card aspect of it, an actual exciting thing.

And not just like kind of part of the rules, if that makes sense.

- You have like a challenge back action, back, - And extra.

- Something.

Yeah.

Any of those, just look at any games that you've seen or that you know, are really popular right now, or even some more niche games.

And like, where do you draw inspiration to have like the, the flow of the game, something that you want to continue?

"(upbeat music)" - We got a chemical separation.

So as a chemical thing in the college we had to, they took sand and sugar mixed it together.

And you had to separate it.

- Yeah.

So there's in his gas tank.

So he had to kind of figure out how to do it, but he had to use fire and water, but I there's gonna be a, - Did you say fire?

We might go the next one.

- You had to boil off the water.

- You had to filter out the sand and then boil off water.

- This is still a better item again.

We're on TV.

Want demo afraid.

- The brainstorming here, come on, Come on.

What else we got?

- Okay.

We had a gear drive gear drive for other different things, but a lot of that's been done quite a bit of it's been done different tier for different yeah.

- Building model cars.

- There's a lot of pressure to build that in like to get it to work - Yeah.

Over here.

I mean, it's doable.

It's not a bad idea, but I'm just saying when you have 46 hours to do something.

- And you made a good point.

I mean, you already know that there's a lot of items out there that do it, unless you offer something radically, like feels inventive and different to what's there.

This could be a tough challenge to beat the rest of.

- You know, if I was with my siblings for 48 hours, they'd be like table be flipped over as well.

- But the cool thing about them is they're actually, they act like kids where the table.

And I think that's probably the team that you can feel the most.

- Alot of giggling.

Yeah, A lot of giggling and they're playing pranks on each other.

- When we first went to the table, they had about 10 ideas.

- Oh yeah, yeah.

That's you're right.

They did start with actually, they were the, probably the one team that had the most ideas.

I'm surprised how many people didn't just take longer to come up with ideas.

Because when we do stuff we're like hundreds of ideas filtering down to one.

- Decks of drawings and stuff - Yeah, and you kind of like throw them all out there and get inspiration.

- Go out, mix things.

- Yeah, mix and match.

- They were probably the closest, I think to doing a little bit of that.

- But I only think they have a couple of strong things.

I think they could, they could quickly get going.

- The one thing that the mentors didn't scrap was we wanted to do a trajectory launch pad and launch rocket and learn the trajectory of the launch based on the pressure and the angle and then have it release balloons on the base of the target of the target.

- They went like with this item, they could already start building, you get like a real jump on everyone else and really have, have the time to really make them impressive prototype.

- Yeah.

We've had a couple different ideas.

The one we're really looking at right now is sort of a, an advanced version of maybe a water table where we can take advantage of some sort of pressurized or pumped water to either, you know, power something or just create a building environment around that.

So kind of going beyond your typical, you know, water table or, you know, your typical other little building tools, we're still kind of in the works as to what we think is the distinguishing feature about it that we want to have.

And, and what is essential to make it qualify as a steam toy?

Is it enough to just be artistic?

Is it enough to just be a design and build or do we need to have some sort of, you know, energy or physics component to it?

So we're really trying to decide because how to distill it down into its most basic idea, especially because there's a 48 hours to do it.

- All right.

We've got lots of rifts on a general theme of a water based building toy.

The latest version is picture light bright, but three dimensional and water based.

So you can plug in tubing that lights up and can be manipulated curves, sculpted to build a structure that water flows through.

- So what technology are you using to power the lights?

Can you tell me more about the water?

- So, actually you could do a Google search for like there's these little L E D lights that go on the end of your faucets.

- Oh yeah.

- So when, and so we were just thinking that we could have it to the company in China, change that.

So instead of it being a, a faucet adapter, it would just be a coupling.

So it'd be the same technology just modified.

- Coupling lights up.

That's fine.

- So let me make sure I understand what's happening.

It's a tabletop or a table with maybe this faucet type of lights.

So when water touches it, it lights up and then you're seeing the add toys on top of the lights.

- So part of the path, so you can see here, this is a rough sketch, but you know, as the water moves through the path, there might be different things where the water turns like a spiral type, you know, gadget or you know, maybe other little add-ons that kind of.

- So you build it on the table though.

I'm just trying to figure out what the lights would've been.

Just ornamental use.

- Are definitely ornament.

- What we can novel about this is the water based construction toy We've seen construction toys that you can manipulate the flow of water.

We have not seen construction toys that are like this.

- I think it's cool.

- It is cool.

Let me do more research and see - Kids would love it.

- I wanna give you guys a number to look at.

I think this is something real similar.

Actually this is a UK patent application though.

So I don't think it would be infringing, but it's a pipe construction kit and they're doing something very similar where you can attach it to a liquid supply, which could be water.

And then the liquid flows through the pipes to an outlet.

The liquid supply could be a hand pump and it could be used for water play or construction in bathtubs and things.

And it's basically a kit is still very different because I think that well and the way that you would easily get around this where you still may have something is no one has put it in a table.

So the way I would present this, if they ask about the patent component is you're not the first to have a structure with lights and water.

You know, where water can operate the lights, make the lights, turn different colors, flexible piping.

We know that exists, but the combination of the light, the toys, the tubing, plus the structure that you're saying is portable the table or that tray or whatever you're using.

That would, to me be something unique.

- I think they like the ideas.

They seem to think that they were doable and not something somebody was currently doing, which was nice.

But at least we're on a right unique track.

- The teams come in and they iterate on their idea in front of us, which is pretty neat.

And that's what they've all been doing so far.

It seems like I'm excited to see what some of them come up with.

You know, again, they're too high level to really get excited yet, but once they solve some of those problems.

- Right, and we're easy to please, right?

We're patent attorneys.

So our job isn't to say, Hey, I think this is good or bad, but whether or not they're infringing or if they have something that's patentable.

But personally I like all toys.

So I'm excited to see the final product so I can play with some of these cool toys.

"(upbeat music)" - We are dealing with the best of the best of four cities of competitions.

So what we have here is a new level of competition and the stress levels do seem to be a little higher this time around, but you know, they, these teams also know the routine.

They know that this program that we're running through is the same as the others that they've been through.

- I feel like some of the teams are stuck right now, but I think they're also really excited.

I think they have so many different ideas going on in their head.

So it's kind of tough when you're really excited about something to kind of narrow it down.

- So tomorrow, you know, you go to the hardware store.

- So currently we have the idea, we have everything that we're going to include in it right now.

We're just gathering all the materials in order to be able to make a good prototype to present to the judges.

- So tomorrow we need one eighth inch board.

- So yes we can.

I can make a bushing to go from here to this.

Yep.

And then if you want this either made smaller or if you want to just cut that end off.

- I think that's easy.

Yeah.

- I'm very excited about these teams.

I, I know many of them because I've been in a couple of the city events and there's some real talent here.

Some of them have boxed themselves into some real design corners and it's gonna be really interesting to see in the next 24 hours, how they get themselves out.

- We need a coupler that goes to this fitting To this tube As well as we need some way to, to adapt the gauge.

To the rest of the.

- We are working on the design of the first prototype, where we still have some variables that we want to work on and fine tune them for our working prototype.

So we are designing that we are gonna manufacture with laser engraving and 3D printing.

And then once we have that, we are gonna try and fine tune all those better nerves for then have hopefully defined final prototype and product for the presentation.

- So normally when you first come up with an idea, you think it's the best idea in the world.

So that's how everybody's feeling right now.

But tomorrow we're gonna do a lot of prototyping to see if their ideas still hold up the next day.

- During day two is made for champions.

For sure.

Yeah.

It's like tonight is the last night that we can get probably a full night of sleep.

I anticipate on being here.

Definitely like all day tomorrow.

Day two is intense.

Especially once they get back from the supply run.

Cause for real, it don't really hit you that like, okay, these hours are going like there ain't no pause.

Ain't no like, come back, rewind.

We miss.

So what happened?

We need some more time.

Like, no, you gotta get to it.

Cause that buzzer is gonna hit on Sunday.

Like ain't no way around it.

- On the next episode of make 48, the teams go to a local hardware store to pick up supplies.

- Good morning teams, are you guys ready to head out and grab the materials that are gonna help you bring your prototypes to life?

- Then they begin designing and building their prototypes.

- So I just wanted to make sure I have everything clear because we did switch from like a bear that's sitting upright, right?

Cause now he's on his stomach.

- Make 48, make 48 is funded by.

- Stanley black and Decker provides tools and services around the globe to help turn great ideas into reality and to help us shape the world we live in.

We proudly support programming that inspires invention, innovation, and hard work together with make 48.

We're providing men and women, the tools and resources to build a better world, Stanley black and Decker.

For those who make the world.

- To Learn more about the invention process and to get to know the teams visit, make48.com (gentle instrumental music fades) (soft instrumental music) (soft instrumental music) (soft instrumental music)