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By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Shana Yamashita, a fifth-grader at Aina Haina Elementary,
cuts a meatball with her "Shana's Sharpstix," chopsticks
with an edge to cut food. She won a $500 savings bond
in the 2000 Craftsman/NSTA Young Inventors
Awards Program.

Young inventor
sticks by her
sharp idea

An embarrassing moment
was the inspiration

By Wilma Jandoc
Star-Bulletin

Have you ever tried cutting a large piece of food with dull, square chopsticks, only to have it slip from your plate?

Shana Yamashita, a fifth-grade student at Aina Haina Elementary School, giggled when she recalled such a scene.

"Someone was trying to cut chicken, and it flew off their plate," Yamashita said. "It was really embarrassing." But that embarrassment prompted her to attack the problem.

And so were born "Shana's Sharpstix."

Her invention won her second place for the region in the Grades 2-6 Division of the Craftsman/National Science Teachers Association Young Inventors Awards Program. Her prize is a $500 savings bond.

In teacher June Kadomoto's gifted/talented class, Yamashita brainstormed several possible inventions, including a combination pen/correction fluid and a jar lid with rubber grips. She chose the chopsticks as being her best and easiest-to-create invention.

A lot of research went into the making of her chopsticks. She checked mail-order catalogs and stores to see whether her proposed chopstick design was available. It wasn't.

Yamashita also looked through patents and found two different pairs of chopsticks that had blades on one end to cut food. But she wanted chopsticks that would cut without harm to the diner.

Her solution was simple: sand down the end of each chopstick into triangles.

The chopsticks went through several revisions, using both plastic and wooden chopsticks. The diner uses one chopstick to hold the food in place, then cuts using the other, sanded-sharp chopstick.

This is the second year that Kadomoto's students have entered the contest and won a prize. Yamashita's chopsticks were among 10 entries from the school.

"Shana's Sharpstix" also won first place in the Honolulu district of the Invention Convention, a local competition. A special assembly was to be held at the school this morning to honor the inventor and her teacher.

Yamashita hasn't yet decided whether to market her Sharpstix. "I went to stores and asked if they'd buy them. They said they would," she said. Until then, we'll just have to get by with a knife and fork.