A Layton student's fourth-grade science invention helped land her a national television debut next week.
On "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" on Monday, Megan Joy Eddington will show the nation her recent creation, the Bopper. The show was taped May 2 and will air May 7 at 4 p.m. on ABC.
The Bopper launches ping-pong balls onto someone's head to wake them up in the morning. Megan created it as a school project.
In November Megan's class at Mountain View Elementary School in Layton started researching famous inventors and studying how those inventors went about finding solutions to problems.
The students started keeping invention journals where they recorded problems that they encountered on a daily basis. Then they chose one of the problems that they thought they could solve and began creating.
One of Megan's problems was falling back to sleep after her alarm clock went off. "Basically I would shut off the alarm clock and then roll over and sleep for another half an hour," the 10-year-old said.
The Bopper poses a solution to oversleeping. It has a long, blue tube that stores ping-pong balls that drop on someone's head.
Megan said she used the Bopper for about a week. "Then I stopped using it because my room kept being too messy," she said.
The Bopper is hooked up to a timer, which triggers it to turn on at a certain time.
"The first night we tried it we accidentally set the time wrong," Megan said. "We set it for midnight so my Bopper went off at midnight. I turned it off and I started getting ready for school."
Megan presented her device to her classmates and others during an invention convention at Mountain View Elementary School Jan. 25.
After that convention "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" contacted Megan's teacher, Mary Jane Coombs, urging students to submit a video about their invention to the show. Megan said about half of the students in her class submitted videos.
"After (we submitted it) we didn't hear from them for a long time," Megan's father, Ray, said.
But then the Eddingtons were contacted by the Ellen show, and Megan was invited to showcase her contraption on the show. She was the only student from her class to receive an invitation.
She flew out to Burbank, Calif., with her mother, father and brother on May 1.
"I think it's going to be fun," Ray Eddington said before the trip.
Megan said she was excited about her appearance on the show. "I'm way more excited than nervous, but I am a little nervous," she said.
E-mail: nclemens@desnews.com