Seventh graders at Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Rockford, Illinois are learning about STEM — but they’re also learning about real-world challenges.
The students have taken on a new project: assembling “solar suitcases” to help bring electricity to schools in Uganda’s Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement, which is home to 270,000 South Sudanese refugees.
It’s an initiative led by We Share Solar, a nonprofit that provides science and technology learning projects for students that then go on to benefit other students in low-income areas of the world.
The project introduces middle schoolers to fundamental electrical concepts, like positive and negative charges, voltage, amps, and wiring, ultimately producing a 12-volt DC solar power system that will be distributed among the refugee community.
“We’ve learned many things like positives and negatives, amps, volts, all that stuff, and how to wire stuff together,” Pratham Mehta, one of the Thurgood Marshall students, told WIFR News.
“We’re taking all this stuff for granted, and other countries don’t have all this stuff, like electricity.”
The suitcases will bring electricity to 40 schools in the refugee settlement, which provide education to over 12,000 students. They are designed to be easily transported (thus the suitcase design), which makes them ideal for off-grid locations, like a refugee camp.
The panels in the suitcase collect sunlight and harness the energy in a built-in battery. It can then provide power to up to five light bulbs for 50 to 60 hours a week. Depending on the capacity of the system, it can also help power small electronics like phones or radios.
For people in the Bidi Bidi settlement — one of the largest refugee settlements in the world — this kind of power can make an enormous impact.
In fact, We Share Solar has deployed over 1,000 suitcases to “energy-scarce locations” across the world, with more than 500,000 students and teachers benefitting from the power they provide.
“The We Share Solar education program serves youth twice,” Hal Aronson, co-founder of the organization, said, “first as an educational experience for American youth and second as a renewable power and lighting system for youth in parts of the world that lack electricity.”
Along with connecting students to learning opportunities, the organization ensures each device is tested by a professional to ensure it is built to withstand energy demands. Then, the suitcases are installed by trained partners in destination countries, and students and teachers alike learn about the new clean energy technologies they have implemented.
At the start of the 2024 school year, the We Share Solar program was implemented in 13 Illinois schools, training educators in the curriculum and setting up the project across the state.
“This is just the beginning,” a Facebook post from We Share Solar states. “These passionate teachers will now guide their students in building solar cases, providing a hands-on STEM experience with real-world impact.”
For Thurgood Marshall teacher Stacy Wallace, the impact was clear.
“The students were just really wowed by the fact [of] how cramped the classroom was and that they’re sitting on benches with little bitty tables with not a lot of supplies,” Wallace told My State Line. “So, I think just realizing that something as little as light can make a lot of difference.”
Header image courtesy of Thurgood Marshall Middle School/Facebook
