Solar Cars

And the countdown continues: 42 days, 12 hours, 29 minutes

Camila and Leon doing some soldering

to go until Campamento IV.  We had a little event last weekend to begin the summer activities. Kelli did some research (online of course) and found some plans to build solar powered cars out of household goods. So we got to talking and decided this would be a great project to do with the campers. And then we got to talking some more and thought about how electricity, or the constinsten lack thereof, is such an issue in the D.R..  Last summer the electricity (locally known as Juanita) would not be working pretty much all day. It then came on at night when lights and, even more importantly for this over-heated gringo, fans were needed. "Se fue Juanita" (there goes Juanita) was a constant refrain. So, as we were talking, we came up with the idea of using renewable energy as this summer's environmental theme. Seems like a good fit right?

But ... before we built these solar cars with the campers we thought it might be a good idea to see if we could actually get them to work. So, Kelli dug up the needed household items: a juice carton, some rubber bands, plastic bottle caps, straws and glue sticks, bought little motors, solar panels, and wires and brought everything over to our house last weekend along with her friend and co-worker Leon and his soldering iron. We invited all the teen leaders over to see what we could come up with. Leon showed the kids how to solder the wires to the solar panels and while some of them worked on that the rest worked on building the cars. Meanwhile Evan took notes on design decisions that were made as well the vocabulary needed to explain to the campers the steps for building the cars (always a good idea to work in a little Spanish when we can right?)

After some tinkering we got the car to work so I think we're in business. 

Here's what the prototype looks like:

Pretty cool huh?