Patent Search Challenge

Dean Kamen

I offered a research session this week for students in a high school entrepreneurship camp called the TALENT UPgrade Experience.  As part of the two week camp, students conduct a lot of online research. For example:

• Is my business name already trademarked?
• Is my product idea, or some part of it, patented?
• How do I find the size of my market?
• Who is my competition?
• Where do I find information about how to ... (fill in the blank, from how to use PHP to add, edit and drop records from an online database, to how to solder photovoltaic cells, to how to boost the signal from a Peltier chip, etc.)

What's nice about this kind of research is that it is interest-driven. Students have personal reasons to search for and evaluate answers. 

To help make sure they know that the first two bullets are Deep Web searches, I provided some challenges.  Here's one of them you may want to try:

CHALLENGE 1: Dean Kamen

What was the title of Dean Kamen's first patent?
How old was he when he filed this patent?


Submit your answers--and how you got them--to this blog.