A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.
It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.
Photo: Oita Hatumei
16-year-old Wataru Onoda, a second-year student at Kundong High School, was inspired to create the ingenious apparatus by an experience within his own family. When cutting a birthday cake into seven slices for every family member present, Onoda’s mother was left with an eight slice that the high-school student had to fight with his two sisters over. In the end, they played rock-paper-scissors for it.
The friendly dispute made the 16-year-old that cutting cake or pizza into equal portions was a common problem, but one that he was confident he could solve. With the help of two colleagues, Rinto Kimura (17) and Mitsumi Zaimae (18), he created a device that lets anyone divide any round treat into perfectly equal slices.
Aptly named “Get Along Well With Everyone“, the ingenious device consists of a turntable upon which the cake or pizza is set by the user, and a laser system that projects the exact angle at which every slice has to be cut depending on the number of necessary portions.
Photo: Oita Hatumei
Using geometry and math, Onoda and his colleagues calculated the exact size and angle at which the slices need to be cut, depending on the desired number of slices. All the user has to do is adjust an arrow-shaped slider to the desired number of slices, and the laser beam will guide their knife to cut perfectly equal portions.
Because no part of Get Along Well With Everyone comes in contact with the food, it’s not only extremely precise but also hygienic.
Wataru Onoda’s project won the Oita Governor’s Award at the 80th edition of the Kufu Invention Exhibition, an annual event designed to cultivate the spirit of ingenuity among children and students, and to stimulate interest in intellectual property such as inventions.
