Comments about ‘Power of play: Y. project helps Ghanian kids spin electricity’

What an awesome idea! I saw this story on tv, and the little lights that the kids can take home to use at night were amazing. I hope this merry go round lighting system catches on so that more people like the ones in Ghana can enjoy light.

Wow, now that's a successful project. Great stuff!

Great to see good minds at work.

Enter to learn, go forth to serve.

Well done.

What an excellent idea. I have been to countries in Africa and know what a difference the playground makes, but to make electricity at the same time... ingenious. This will be a boon to the people there. Thank you for all you are doing for these wonderful people.

I have always wished I had a way to harness my kids energy. What a brilliant idea. A+ for the implementation as well

Good idea, indeed!!! Take a gold star for this idea and implementation.

A group out of South Africa I believe have used a merry go round set up to pump water out of the ground. Same idea... gold star to them too.

Any chance this would work on the Rosebud Indian reservation; you know, right here in the good old USA?

I think there is more energy stored in America's fat than in all the oil in Anwar or the oil shale! Projects like this could harness it!

BYU-Idaho did an initial design. BYU-Provo just gets the credit for implementing.

The idea orginated at BYU-Provo. Empower Playgrounds pitched the idea to BYU Capstone, which is the senior's final project in the Engineering and Technology School. They have worked on it for a few years now. They have also started ideas for a zipline that does the same thing...
Way cool though! I hope that the students continue their idea and help more people.

With all the exercise these kids are going to get maybe Bronco can talk them into playing football for BYU. He has a way of spinning things anyway.

Energy Crisis wants to harness our energy from exercise. Wait a minute, I've seen this somewhere before... Oh, yeah, that's similar to what they did in the Matrix films.

Sounds like a "great" idea. Let's go from working in the mind-numbing corporate environments now made so infamous by fils like "Office Space" and shows like "The Office", and start "plugging in" at Gold's Gym for 8 hours a day to power the AC.

That doesn't sound like progress to me. The only energy crisis we have suffered is not having such high oil prices in the 90's so that we would have real green energy solutions by now.

All sarcasm aside, this is a super idea that could benefit many people in third world countries. AND I wonder whether the device could be made to fit an exercise bike. ANYTHING we can do to recycle and to produce useable energy is a step away from expensive dependence on fossil fuels.

While it's true that expensive oil may cause people to have to cut back, that's a solution that hurts the poor and working classes the worst. Since developing "green" solutions takes time and costs money (most people need an return on their investments) we need all the small-scale developments we can get.

So, good for you guys at BYU--Idaho, Utah, and even Hawaii where they've done some interesting things with square foot gardening!