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Education Nine year old schoolboy re-designs rail system in St Petersberg:

"was the image of the notoriously traffic-clogged Ulitsa Bukharestskaya shown on television news that inspired Vadim Turgel, nine, to design an overhead railway to serve the whole city. "I thought it could save St. Petersburg from those terrible traffic jams," Turgel said. Turgel's railway, raised on inflated bags, is a sophisticated design and might just work, engineers who have examined the young inventors' proposal say.

A new form of teaching was been developed in the old Soviet Union which discounted the idea of random inspiration in favour of a form of focused problem solving. TRIZ bombards kids with questions and asks them to think of a logical answer. So for example, ask them, 'What is wet on one side, but dry on another' they'll think it through and say a window with keeps the inside dry when it rains. This understanding can then be extrapolated to form the backbone for some new design or descovery. See if you can answer this one: "How to free a bird stuck in a vertical tube that sticks out of the ground?" (answer here)