The Harnessing the Wind STEM Challenge

This STEM Challenge provides students with a chance to design and develop a functional windmill while considering how a similar device might provide green energy for our future energy needs. The challenge is made even more relevant and engaging given the incredible story and useful solution that was recently developed by a teenage African boy named William Kamkwamba.  Chronicled first in a book and now in a movie, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind offers some teachable moments that are difficult to come by.   

This challenge also provides a good opportunity to teach and/or review about the fundamental nature and cause of wind.  For elementary students, we should emphasize that wind is moving air and that we can use the energy in the wind to do useful things. We can also use tools called windmills that use the energy in the wind to do helpful things.  Windmills have used for centuries to grind grain into flour for baking and pump water from one place to another. 

 In the STEM Challenge itself the students’ task is to to build a windmill that  that can lift some small objects and do some useful work.