Saving the World

A few extra hours of light
Ghana is 5 degrees off from the cross hares that are made by the prime meridian and the equator and therefore there is almost exactly 12 hours of sun. That means that year round there is about 11 hours of darkness each day. If you are in one of the many African villages where it is prohibitively expensive to have wires run across the jungle/savanna/dessert what would you do during the 4 hours of darkness you spend awake each day?

In Ghana, village schools with out electricity don't have much light in the mud huts and often require learning by audible memorization. Especially during the rainy season, lighting inside schools is poor and adds another challenge in the learning process.

How can these issues be resolved? Energy is all around, it just needs to be transferred into usable electrical energy. Kids have lots of energy. Why not tap into that by bleeding off a little energy from a merry go round that they are pushing?

The BYU Manufacturing Engineering Technology Capstone Team
Empower Playgrounds Inc has given us the task of coming over here to Ghana, work in a job shop here with a team of of metal workers, carpenters etc to build the first merry go round that will light up a village that has no way to get electricity besides batteries. Tomorrow we will install the toy that we have spent 4 days working on in a small village school called Essam. I'm excited to see how the children react to the first playground equipment they have ever seen.

Not only will this provide light, but hopefully, as they see the engineering that goes into this, they will be inspired to learn more about renewable energy and have a better understanding of the way energy can be converted from food to mechanical to electrical energy.

Documenting the Project
Sunday night a BYU film crew and a photographer arrived here in Ghana to shoot a BYU commercial and news story. Yesterday they took lots of picture and film of fabricating the merry go round and today they went out to the village to shoot before installing the MGR. We will install it tomorrow. The commercial will be aired during televised sporting events and on KBYU. Pictures taken will be on BYU's homepage and there will be a audio slide show online as well (Like the football ones). All of this publicity for Empower Playgrounds Inc will help the not-for-profit get off the ground and will provide the means of getting power to a multitude of villages across rural Africa.