Young inventor has winning idea

Ah, those pesky staples gone awry.

As a home-schooled student, Luke Anderson, 12, has to print and collate a lot of papers. He got tired of getting stuck in the fingers - and even in the toes - when the stapler shot out a stray.

Instead of griping, he did what he always has done.

He came up with an invention.

It's a simple box with a magnet inside that grabs twisted staples, spilled pins and fallen thumb tacks. When he's ready to get them out, a quick flick of a lever along with a specially designed rim of the box frees the sharp stuff into the trash.

His parents, John and Shari Anderson of Tampa, thought it clever, but not surprising. Luke and his brother, Ben, 14, have been coming up with inventive solutions since they were little boys, encouraged by a creative mother and a dad with a degree in electrical engineering. They grew up playing with circuit boards and getting jazzed by hammers and socket sets for Christmas.

All four Andersons are inventors. Shari designed Luke's room to look like an upside-down skate park; she found 99-cent faux brick doormats to create a trompe l'oeil effect on Ben's retro-look walls. John, meanwhile, can fix just about anything.

Both parents taught their children to look for answers to problems rather than complain.

"We have folders we keep with our ideas to make our lives easier," says Ben, who often sketches his.

"He's amazing at drawing," Luke says of his brother.

Ben has an invention so close to receiving a patent and going into production that even his grandparents haven't been told what it is.

Inventors, even the youngest ones, do not spill.

Luke kept his magnetic box, dubbed the Staple Tank, in his desk drawer. His mother pulled it out one day. She had heard about a contest at the University of South Florida for young inventors and, boy, did Luke need a lift.

A scary experience

A few months before, terrible pain in his belly and scary weight loss drove the family to endure days of testing. The diagnosis was Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder affecting the digestive tract.

The symptoms were so severe Luke had to leave school and begin home-schooling - not a terrible fate because his brother was taking online high school courses through the Hillsborough County Virtual School. Ben had sailed past the most advanced offerings at his middle school and needed to move ahead.

The boys get up every morning and begin working side by side at their laptops.

Crohn's disease is no picnic

Crohn's has been rough. The pain is bad, and a feeding tube down Luke's throat at night made him feel as if he were suffocating. He frequently has to drink nasty-tasting stuff to coat his intestines. His diet is severely limited to easily digestible foods such as applesauce.

A trip to Colorado in January for his birthday had to be cut short when Luke's anemia and weakness led to altitude sickness.

"We were all broken due to yet more illness to his little body," John says. "It was so increasingly obvious that we were losing him to this disease of starvation. He was out of energy to tolerate the pain."

Soon after, his mother submitted the Staple Tank, and it was chosen from 200 entries as one of 10 finalists.

"Becoming a finalist for Luke was just what he needed to focus on to keep him moving forward," says John, a pilot for United Parcel Service.

Luke would have to make a presentation in front of a crowd, and his parents prepared him for what to do if he had stomach pain on stage.

"It was going to be a successful night if he could just get through it," his father says.

Luke did get through it, charming the judges by letting them play with the device.

"That was smart," says Karen Holbrook, USF vice president for research and one of the judges of the Innovation Express Youth Inventors Contest, which was held in February. "The invention was really clever and very simple and very useful. My immediate thought was it would be so good for picking up pins when I'm hemming."

Luke won for his age group, as did Ashley Blessin, a third-grader at Walden Lake Elementary, for her Two-Way Cupper, a plastic cup divided to serve two drinks at once.

Both won $1,000. Luke donated $100 of his to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America for research.

A big trophy, the giant check and his poster-board explanation of the Staple Tank are on front-and-center display in the alcove of the family's foyer.

Improved, but still coping

Luke is doing better and beginning to put on weight. Not skateboarding yet. Still drinking the yucky stuff.

But is there a way to make it taste better? Could you make a smaller camera to shoot video of your guts? Can a feeding tube be invented that doesn't make a guy gag?

Luke might find a way to work it out.