Feature: Canadian teen's patent-winning solution for campus problems

Ann Makosinski, a first-year student at Vancouver's University of British Columbia (UBC), has figured out a solution to two problems on high school campuses and named it the E-Drink.

"The idea for the E-Drink came when I noticed my friends back in high school having two main problems. The first one was that their coffee was taking too long to cool down, and the second one was that their phones were always running out of battery," she said at the university on Friday.

"So I took these two issues and I put them together and I created the E-Drink, which harvests excess heat of your hot drink while you're waiting for it to cool down and converts into electricity," she said.

"So you eventually have enough charge to give your Ipod or Iphone a small boost of energy," she told Xinhua.

This invention is not new for Makosinski. Five years ago she created a flashlight that used heat from users' hand to generate power for the flashlight's LED bulb.

She has since appeared on American late night talk shows with her inventions, and has been named one of Time Magazine's Top 30 Under 30.

Makosinski presented a mug charger at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2015, and won several awards.

"I've always been interested in making things since I was a kid because I wasn't given a lot of toys, so I had to ... use the resources around me to make stuff to entertain me or solve my own problem, and I started doing science fair when I was in grade six," she said.

The first-year arts student at UBC recently earned a 50,000-Canadian-dollar (36,000-U.S.-dollar) grant from Shell Canada for helping find clean energy solutions with her inventions.

She's not just working hard on her studies and inventions, but is also working on going into business with her E-Drink.

"I'm getting all the patent stuff covered, it's covered right now, so we're protected, and we are hoping to put it into production," she added. Endi