Creating a toy about sustainable energy
This story is about a project I started during my internship at Les Savanturiers.
The energy box project began with a meeting the team had with the Casden, the bank of teachers in France. Les Savanturiers is developing a new way to teach science to children, using the education by research method (kind of similar to the inquiry based learning, but Les Savanturiers had to the method an interaction with a real life researcher, and on questions that are sometimes without existing answers), and this bank was interested for a partnership. Indeed they were willing to develop an educational game on ecology. There first idea was to give some kinds of weather station to children, regarding of the COP 21 happening recently.
Long story short, since I have a background in engineering, and I’m interested in the education about ecology and sustainable development, I ended up in charge of the creation of this toy.
When I started to work on this project, my previous classes on scientific games and my common senses were tingling. Indeed, the first idea we had, the weather station, was kind of poor in terms on pedagogical content. Yes, children were able to tinker a little bit while doing some little jelly barometers, but there was not much to do about it next. And the electrical device are too expensive for this project (yep, I forgot to mention that the toy needed to be cheap for its creation).
Then I started to hunt for new ideas on internet. And I found the green box. This project made by a tinkerer in the USA, is a small box with two wind mill, a solar panel, and a dynamo, to produce electricity and load small batteries and smartphones. This idea looked so cool to me, and I immediately saw an interesting project for children of various ages. Of course, it couldn’t be that complicated to built, so I started to search with that first model a way to make it a cool toy for kids.
We thought with my colleagues that working in questions might be a better way to give to children the will to search, explore and discover new things, so we asked this question : where is the energy ? And how can someone harness some of that energy ?
With those question in mind, the game had to become a tool to explore, to find where it was possible to find energies, and how to optimize the harvest. To stick to the spirit of ecology and sustainable development, I decided to keep the same to the box : solar panel, wind mill, and dynamo. But they would just power on LEDs, so that the game became a sensor for children. The complete structure will be open, so that the toy can be enhanced by older children.
After a few hours of reflexion and buying the necessary stuff, here is the first prototype, for presentation mainly :
The toy is supposed to be made mainly of wood, prepared by a laser cutter, to keep the ecological spirit in it. Three line of LED are powered by three different sources of electricity : a solar panel, a wind mill and a hand mill. The child should have to use this box to find places or uses to light as much as possible.
And for now… the project is stuck. We are waiting for the partnership to go on, but I do hope that it will be a source of ideas for other people !
NC for the master EdTech
