“We were able to make something not just to make it, but to have it serve a purpose and be helpful.”
“I learned a lot about saving energy!”
“It was a big effort to make a small change, but it is a piece of the bigger puzzle.”
“This has been a really awesome project!”
These Middle School boys are talking about a project they have been working on since last fall, one that called on their electrical, mechanical, and mathematical skills and which will make a difference at Fenn by helping to save electricity. Under the guidance of Cameren Cousins and Pauline MacLellan, the boys are putting the finishing touches on a mobile solar iPad charger.
The project began as a conversation between Cameren and Pauline last fall. “What if we offered an afterschool session for middle schoolers to build simple iPhone chargers from a kit?” they wondered. That evening, Pauline received an email about a meeting at the Watertown Public Library’s makerspace, Hatch, about their efforts to organize a group to build a solar powered iPhone charging bench. Pauline realized this would be an even better project, “and much more complex,” she said, than building some small and simple chargers, and Cameren agreed.
In their initial pitch at All School Meeting, Cameren pointed out that it requires forty-eight watt-hours to fully charge an iPad, and if you charge the device three times a week, that’s 144 watt hours, or Whs. Over the course of the year, that’s more than five kilowatt hours, or kWhs—to charge one iPad. And some 333 iPads are in use at Fenn.
About fifteen boys expressed interest and the group began meeting twice a week after school. There was no kit and no firm picture of what the finished product would look like, or exactly how the group would accomplish it, Pauline notes. And no plans or project descriptions from which they could borrow.
“From the electronics to the engineering to the construction,” Pauline says, “this has been a rich learning experience for all of us. We gave the boys a great deal of voice and choice in the project, working to help them understand the larger issues, the electrical circuitry, and the basic skills they needed.” The boys had to work on their communication and collaboration skills and “they built empathy for the issue by surveying users and met with Dave Dipersio, head of buildings and grounds, and Dave Platt, assistant headmaster for finance and operations, to gain approval for the project. They built prototypes and models, pitched ideas, and had fun!” she adds.
The group decided that using a commercial garden wagon would be easier and more straightforward than building a cart from scratch, Pauline says, so they bought a kit and built a bright yellow wagon. She describes the rest of the process this way: The boys had to figure out how to attach a solar panel to the wagon, how to do all of the wiring, what gauge wire to get, and how to build waterproof plugs from a kit that would allow for unhooking the battery and bringing it inside. Then they had to design and build the inside charging station that will live in the library. They took apart a car charger with four ports and then retrofitted/hacked it to make it work, as it had built-in step-down software/hardware. Then they had to figure out how to connect all of this and to wire it to connect to the battery. There was lots of electrical engineering and understanding of circuits, volts/watts, soldering, and measuring current.
Sue Fisher, who while at Fenn assisted Pauline with developing makerspace activities and is now at Meadowbrook as a technology integrationist, cut the Plexiglas pieces for the clear box that holds the charging station electronics as Fenn’s laser cutter will not arrive until fall.
On Grandparents Day, the team displayed the solar charger cart in Ward Hall and described the process. In a later interview with the boys, their excitement about participating in the project was palpable and each of their comments bore an exclamation point as they vied to offer their perspectives on the experience.
“Climate change is having an affect now! All of the warning bells are going off!” declared Will Skelly. But what impressed him the most was that, “Some people in our generation get an idea and they’re all excited but they don’t follow through with it to make a difference. But we did! We made it happen!”