We’re still buzzing here at the Local Electricity Project. We’ve just landed back in the UK after delivering a really exciting Le1 workshop in northern Greece.
We were lucky enough to be invited out by Habibi.Works: an extraordinary organisation which empowers refugees from Kartika refugee camp to create solutions and share skills by providing a workshop space which includes access to tools and technology, from drills and saws to 3D printers and laser cutters. They have an impressive set up and it was a privilege to work with such an inspirational set of participants and volunteers.
Our workshop was run over four days and we worked with eight participants.
By the end of the workshop everyone had learnt how to solder (the students made their own Le1s!), they also designed and built their own generator, attached the generator to their Le1, created useful electricity to charge their phones.
We also had a bit of time to lead an electronics session and talk about innovation and different modes of thought and planning... what a week!
When we arrived at the space and met the ‘students’, we quickly discovered that a few of the people we would be working with had a level of knowledge and experience with electricity generation which surpassed our own - now who’s the student?! One of the attendees - Mustafa - had created a hydro-electricity generator which powered 50 homes in his village in Afghanistan.
We started to wonder how useful we were going to be.
We quickly realised, to our delight, that because the Le1 can be taught at so many different levels of abstraction and from many different viewpoints, that even Mustafa could get something valuable from it. This seemed like another brilliant confirmation of the versatility of the Le1 as a teaching and learning tool.
We have now run successful workshops with year 9 students in Zambia, GCSE physics and STEM students in UK schools, and now we’ve gone all the way through to using it to teach sophisticated electronics with people who have years of experience generating electricity. We have to admit to being a bit proud of our little circuit board.
Students on the course came up with some brilliant ideas for generating electricity. We had a wind turbine, a water turbine (placed under a drain when it rains), and a restored solar panel. All of them generated enough electricity to charge a phone: always an exciting moment!
We have left some as yet unsoldered Le1 kits at Habibi.works and we are waiting excitedly to hear what fantastic ideas for electricity generation come out of the wonderful minds that are there. We’ll post an update when we find out.
