Intro: Engineering Brightness is a program that my science 9 class is participating in. Our goal is to create lights for a place in our world that is suffering in light poverty. We have skype chatted with two different places, in order to gather as much information about the place we are helping and the place where it all began.
The skype chat with the dominican republic was a real eye opener. It was very sad to learn about how it was hard for kids my own age to participate in an extra curricular activity because they had to work or because it was too dark to do. It was hard to learn that many of them were enduring paid slavery, because slavery is such a serious issue and to see that people are being forced to work in order to survive is unimaginable and there are people as close as the dominican republic suffering from this issue. During the skype chat we learnt that in the city there are private school where the kids that are fortunate enough to live in the city get to attend. These private schools are equivalent to the kind of school that we are attending. But out in the communities is where light is scarce. Our skype call with Dennis and Eladio inspired our group to start some fundraising projects. Our potential fundraisers include bake sales and photo booths. More than anything we want to spread the word about light poverty as it is something that I didn’t know about before this project.
•So far we have formed two connections with the world outside of our school. The first connection has been with Eladio and Dennis, we asked them if they could together a short clip of video footage and photos so that we can put together a fundraiser video.
•Our second connection was actually creating two different social media platforms to start to spread the word and promote our upcoming fundraisers.
https://www.instagram.com/engineeringbrightness/
https://twitter.com/EBSaveTheLights
•We would definitely like to form some kind of a connection with a business or receive some money from a sponsor which was the advice we received during our skype chat with New Brunswick.
Video of me asking a question during the skype chat:
Our skype chat with Mr. Fogarty was very helpful and insightful, my favourite part was definitely when one of his students came in to talk about her experience she was talking about a light that she created and how it was a successful creation that she was able to send over. It was definitely very inspiring to see how the project can succeed.
The group we are planning to collaborate with had Alhan ask a question about using shakable lights, which is the type of light we are planning to put our money fundraised towards. Alhan explained how we could make lights with electromagnets where you would shake the lights and it would conduct a charge, with which would be a kinetic generator and Mr. Fogarty even gave an idea where we could attach the lights to a goat so that they could be producing the energy during the day so that the citizens can use them at night. Or we could even get them to walk around with the light tied to there foot so that it would work at night when they needed the light. This concept really interested me and I am very excited to get started on fundraising so that we can raise enough money.
Our general ideas so far have include various fundraisers, PhotoBooth, Bake sales, Hot chocolate sales, ect. We are also like mentioned above going to work with Alhans group to hopefully be able to create shakable lights to send over to the Dominican Republic. I also would like to set up another skype chat with Dennis and Eladio in hopes to teach them how to make the lights that we will be creating so that with funding help from our fundraisers they can begin to make the lights themselves which will help to become self sufficient. We will definitely need help from Mr. Robinson, Others around our school to contribute, Alhan’s group with the lights and Dennis and Eladio with the video footage.
We will be having a Christmas themed photo booth on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week to raise money for the cause. Please come support to help us with this cause.
A special thank you to Mr. Robinson, Mr. Fogarty, Dennis and Eladio for bringing this project to our class. This experience has made me feel very fortunate to live in a place like Canada and I am looking forward to begin to create a similar environment in the dominican republic where the communities no longer have to live in the dark.
Donate here: