For my Connections – Based Learning project, my group and I decided to focus on solar power because it’s sufficient for people in Yemen to use when they don’t have electricity. My group has faced problems and difficulties but in the end, we made a solar power lantern  by re-using a plastic water bottle. We decided to re-use a water bottle because it’s affordable, easy to work with and better for the environment.

We also tweeted Panasonic after seeing a page on their website that talked about donating 100 thousand solar lanterns from 2013-2018 to people in need. Unfortunately the company didn’t contact us back, but we still got to read about peoples stories and how the solar lanterns helped and effected them.

Here’s a picture of the solar lantern we made, at the top there is the solar panel that one of my group members got from their neighbour who works with solar power equipment. Throughout this project, I got to learn a lot more about Yemen and Gaza and the difficulty of having access to electricity in those countries. We connected with Panasonic because we are doing a similar project. Even though we can’t donate as many solar lanterns, the one lantern we made can still have just as big of an impact on someones life. My group and I are hoping to mail our solar lantern to some place in Yemen, although it is hard getting things into the country. As you can see in the picture below, if you flip the lanterns switch on and cover the solar panel the light in the bottle turns on.

A skill I’ve developed and ameliorated from this project has been my leadership role. At the beginning of the year my teacher asked us who would want to be a leader in the class for class projects or group activities and I decided taking on this role. From having leadership the first semester, I grew a lot in taking initiative and leading in groups. I wanted to continue to grow in this specific area by trying to keep my group on task and focused on the project. I also helped assign roles to each individual so they had something to work on and contribute to our final results. Throughout this whole process I learned that solar panels don’t hold energy, but instead solar batteries do. I learned more about the advantages and disadvantages of having solar panels from them being environmentally friendly to being very costly (depending on the size of the panel)

The group collaboration was difficult at times, with disagreements and sometimes lack of communication, but in the end we are proud of what we’ve made. In the beginning my group had a bunch of ideas and we were able to work around minor issues with making the solar lantern with what we could and couldn’t make it out of. We could’ve made something or even our own lantern more creative but we decided to keep it simple, efficient and we were able to recycle while making it. I feel like this experience brought me closer to my classmates, I do appreciate the lack of limitation we had to be able to create almost anything, but at the same time it was pretty open-ended and I do wish we had something to base our project off of. Maybe something such as a specific company we’re supposed to make something for and collaborate with someone if possible.