She designed a bulletproof backpack that can be worn by elementary school children. "I can't vote, but I can engineer," Cotroneo told Insider. Maya Shah, 15, from Texas, is another finalist.

So reads an advertisement for BulletBlocker, a company selling bulletproof backpacks and other body armor for children. Since the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 children ...

"We grew up in a generation where our lawmakers look at our dead kids, our dead friends, our dead peers, and they tell us that the answer, that the solution for that was a bulletproof backpack ...