Stanford University researchers Manu Prakash and George Korir won a $50,000 award for a low-cost chemistry set.

Prakash said that the inspiration for the $ 5 kit came from a musical toy. The invention not only acts as a toy for children wanting to learn science, but can also serve as a portable laboratory in developing nations.

Undergraduate student at Stanford University George Korir also worked on the project, which won the prize at The Science, Play and Research Kit (SPARK) Competition.

The latest kit is programmable, cheap to manufacture and easy to use. The chemistry box could be used to detect water quality and run simple diagnostic tools.

"In one part of our lab we've been focusing on frugal science and democratizing scientific tools to get them out to people around the world who will use them," Prakash said in a news release. "I'd started thinking about this connection between science education and global health. The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile."

Inspired by Music Toy                                                                                   

The set is actually a kind of chemical computer, as Prakash calls it. The music box that inspired him had a small hand crank to pull a tiny ribbon. The ribbon was attached to concentric disks via pins. The pins punched through a hole to activate other pins and disks that created sound.

Prakash and Korir used the same rotating pins in his chemical toy box. The chemistry kit has tiny channels for manipulating small droplets of liquid. The user can control the amount of liquid. The  punch card can be programmed and can be used to run chemistry experiments.

"Punch-card paper tapes like this have been used to program computers and fabric looms, so why not chemistry?," Prakash said. 

The chemistry kit could help children conduct experiments. The box could come with pre-punched holes and tiny amounts of chemicals. According to Prakash, children might be able to make their own punched silicon chips.

The research team plans on using the prize money to develop their chemistry kit, to be used by citizen scientists for academic and scientific purposes.

Other prize winners at SPARK included:

  • Robijanto Soetedjo, MD, PhD (Kenmore, WA), a neurophysiologist with the University of Washington, who won second prize. The device had electrodes that let children see the effects of electrical signals produced by their muscles. The science toy aims at encouraging children learn about neuroscience. Soetedjo won $25,000.
  • Two groups won the third prize : Barnas G. Monteith (Tumblehome Learning, Inc.), of Brockton, MA, and a group led by physicist Deren Guler (Brooklyn, NY), won $10,000. The Tumblehome group developed a kit that let children learn about data and analysis, according to a news release.