These teen science fair winners almost never amount to anything exceptional, and are a product intense parental supervision. Most universities have wised up.
So how could he patent it?
I join the parent: it's a kid who empirically evaluated how much weight an existing fold can hold. It's not like he solved a hundred years old mathematical problem.
That said, it may not be strong enough to hold the weight of an adult on one foot.
At this age at school, I remember making all sorts of physics experiments. I don't think it would have been worth giving us a prize and publishing articles saying that "our work on the Newton's laws may someday lead to new insights about orbital mechanics". We dropped an object and measured the time it took to hit the ground, and checked that the physics formulas were predicting it pretty well. That's all.