Our Engineering brightness experience started off when we watched a video on how innovation and trial and error can lead to a very useful product. Our end goal wasn’t to create a product that people can use; it was to engineer brightness to end light poverty. This wasn’t going to be a overnight process, we needed to have a plan so we could work on this for the next month or so. Us learning about the light and energy problems in the Dominican Republic helped us understand why we needed to do this and what methods we should use and which ones would not work in that country. Once we started making the plan, Alhan (One of our group member’s) mentioned to us that her father was an electrician and that he could help us make efficient lights powered by renewable sources.

The next day once Alhan was able to talk to her father we decided to use Kinetic Energy to powers these lights, that would mean they are powered by human motion and could be charged during the day to be used at night. We needed super strong magnets; thanks to Mr. Brown we were able to get super strong magnets and our Kinetic energy was producing a small amount of volts (0.10-2.) We, unfortunately were no able to create a case for the circuit. We ended up only creating a rough circuit and we didn’t have much time to go father than there, however I am extremely happy with what we accomplished the the short time we had and I hope that someone with continue our project so that we can put an end to light poverty.

This is our rough circuit:

I think I learned a lot from this experience. I learned to preserver, innovate more creatively, connect with others in areas they specialize in and most of all I learned that working in a group to innovate can make you achieve things you didn’t think were possible and connecting with people in fields that have to do with electricity can help you make energy in ways you didn’t think would work. I think I learned way more than I was hoping to and in areas I didn’t think I would learn in, I think that this project will make me think deeper in the world and help me create things that can help other people.

I think our collaboration went really great with Eladio and Dennis as well as Mr. Brown who got us the magnets. I think that we did really well by collaborating with Alhan’s father, he was able to help us come up with the main idea. I think we could have worked with New Brunswick more but we still worked well with what we had. I think that CBL is one of the  best ways to learn and helps you learn for the future and can help you make more money at your job. Mr. Robinson did a very good job of doing CBL, some teachers would show us the videos and let us go and do the work ourselves but no, he showed us the videos and helped us with anything we needed. He even came around to ask if people needed help and I thought that he really put this together and without him not much would have happened. I would have like to document with more photos but me and my group kind of got caught up in the moment. In the end I completed my goals and learned quite a bit along the way, I would definitely love to do something like this again in the future.