Invention Convention Tests Creativity of Moorpark Elementary Students : Education: Fourth- and fifth-graders in Flory School’s gifted and talented program display their projects to classmates.

Ten-year-old Ike Williams shyly tried to explain his invention to the horde of students crowding around him at Flory School in Moorpark.

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Dial a number on one of the two old rotary phone dials and an electric signal is sent to a transformer that sends another signal to a small counter, which ticks off the numbers.

Dial the number 1 and it clicks off 1. Dial 2 and it clicks off 2, and so on, adding up the numbers.

It’s an ingenious little “Rotary Adding Machine.”

But Ike’s fellow students, well-versed in the age of computers and pocket calculators, don’t get it.

“So what does it do?” one of them asks the young inventor.

“It adds,” Ike says in a barely audible voice.

And then the boy leaves with a shrug, as does the rest of the group, seemingly unimpressed with the little invention that took four days to build.

It was a tough crowd at Tuesday’s Invention Convention, where about 30 fourth- and fifth-graders in the school’s gifted and talented class displayed 17 of their latest inventions.

The students were put up to the contest by their teacher, Darilyn DeMaria, who figured that the exercise would be a great way of teaching students how to use their creative talents.

She told them to think of a problem and then find a solution.

So the students put their minds to work on some of the more indomitable problems of our day, such as how to count students passing a certain point, or how to keep the living-room carpet clean, or how to pop the top off of a hard-to-open soda can.

“They just used their minds on something that they saw needed fixing or improving,” DeMaria said as she ushered in lines of students from the rest of the school who judged the inventions. “And this is what they came up with.”

Tina Schenewerk, 9, and Nicole Morrison, 11, came up with the “Nature Carpet” as a low-maintenance rug for every household.

For anyone interested, they would conjure up vivid images of being sprawled out in the living room, lying on a soft green carpet of moss.

You don’t have to worry about vacuuming, and you can forget about troublesome stains, they said.

“The stains don’t show up as much,” said Tina, pointing to a dollhouse that she and Nicole had supplied with a wall-to-wall carpet of moss. “All you have to do is remember to water it every day.”

Some of the more utilitarian inventions included the “Pop-Top Can Opener,” made by Savannah Sjostrom, 10, and Millie Parikh, 10. The simple metal hook on a wooden handle can be used by those with arthritis to open soda cans.

Another functional tool was 11-year-old Richard Liu’s “Quickserver”--a dispenser with spigots that can pour an equal amount of liquid into different cups at the same time.

“You do it all at once so it takes a shorter amount of time,” said Richard, who wants to be an inventor some day.

“Inventors can make things easier for people,” he said.