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Students learn hands-on skills building real products for poor customers on a mobile solar generator that provides power and water in emergencies.
The Problem
1. Bridging gaps in STEM education for underserved communities. 2. Providing emergency-response units that generate electricity and pure water from the Sun. 3. Open-source product design and development for Bottom of the Pyramid customers. 4. Job creation.
Our Solution
We start with a mobile solar power generator (instead of a diesel generator), which has value as an emergency-response unit in generating solar electricity and purified water in a disaster. Since this "emergency asset" would just sit around waiting to respond to an emergency -- at great expense -- we've devised an enterprise to use it in the meantime. We take this solar generator, a 25-foot-long trailer with solar panels, inverters and batteries, and use it as a movable classroom to teach kids hands-on skills they might not learn otherwise. The first courses we're creating use STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) based curriculum and design thinking as the basis of project-oriented, hands-on learning, by building actual products. Further, these products are designed and developed for people who live on 1 to 3 dollars a day. And, when there's an emergency or disaster, school's out!, and the unit is deployed to an emergency site where it can provide solar power and clean water for thousands of people.
Our Story & Why You Should Support Us
You should support us because we're providing both a novel education experience and a valuable emergency-response asset. And this program can be easily scaled by adding additional mobile solar generator-teaching platforms. I'm David Alan Foster, Executive Director of Designfluence. I'm building both a team and a coalition, from communities here to villages in East Africa, all of whom benefit in many ways from this project. To our coalition, we're adding volunteers (and staff when funded), entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, students, partner organizations -- profit, nonprofit, government and military -- who support this in some way.