By Joe Gleason

It was an incredible story, and it really stuck in the minds of five Meadow View seniors. At school morning prayer, physics teacher Tim Maloney had described how a 14-year-old Malawian boy, William Kamkwamba, built a windmill out of recycled materials to provide drinking water for his home village in southeast Africa. William studied a physics textbook, then used old bicycle parts and other salvaged items to construct the windmill.

A few weeks later, seniors Chris Cornett, José Gil-Figueroa, Josh Kelly, Johnny Piescik and Ben Redgrave approached Mr. Maloney. Their idea was to build their own 14-foot-high windmill on the school grounds during project week.

“Great idea,” he said. “Do it.”

They set to work on a written proposal that included diagrams, a list of materials and cost estimates, as well as an operations manual detailing how each part of the windmill functioned in relation to the whole.

Chris explains, “We wanted to treat this like it was an actual engineering project, not just something hypothetical.”

During project week they worked to assemble the structure, using lumber, PVC pipe, steel poles and wood paneling. Their design called for an automotive alternator to channel the electrical current, but that’s where their efforts ran into some hiccups. The alternator didn’t work the way they expected it to.

Okay, back to the drawing board.

Mr. Maloney says, “It was wonderful to watch them do legitimate problem-solving in real time.”

“We were really disappointed for a while,” Chris admits.

After some experimenting, they came up with another option–a bicycle dynamo. (This is a machine that converts some of the energy from peddling into enough electricity to power a headlight.)

They bought the dynamo at a bike shop, and it did the trick. The windmill succeeded in powering a light bulb.

Chris sums up the experience: “The best part was when we got it working.”