Ann Makosinski spent her teenage years in Canada listening to opera and tinkering with transistors rather than playing video games. Her first major breakthrough came in 2013 when she was 15, after a friend in the Philippines told her she couldn’t study at night due to a lack of electricity. Makosinski designed the Hollow Flashlight, a device using Peltier tiles to convert the temperature difference between a user's hand and the surrounding air into electricity. The invention required no batteries and won the 2014 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, turning her into a global media sensation and a guest on 'The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon'.
Her curiosity did not stop at the flashlight. At 18, while studying at the University of British Columbia, she developed the eDrink, a coffee mug that captured excess heat from hot beverages to charge mobile devices for up to 30 minutes. She told Society for Science she got the idea after watching friends complain about dead phones and scalding coffee. The mug used similar thermoelectric principles, heating one side of the Peltier tiles with the drink and cooling the other through the mug's design.
Now 29, Makosinski is channeling this thermoelectric expertise into a new venture: educational toys. She has created brightly colored devices that light up, spin, or make sound when powered by sunlight, water, or a hand-wound mechanism. The goal is not just to sell a product but to change how children perceive their relationship with energy and innovation. She wants young girls, in particular, to realize they can invent solutions themselves rather than waiting for established companies to provide them.
"I just want, especially young kids, to feel like they can invent their own solutions and they don’t have to wait for other people to make them," Makosinski told CNN. She describes herself as "a normal girl who just used her time differently after school." The next phase involves scaling these educational tools to reach classrooms globally, continuing her decade-long mission to make clean energy concepts tangible, playable, and accessible to the next generation of inventors.