 greentechZONE Products for the week of May 7, 2007
Thames & Kosmos Says....
Power House Sustainable Technology Experiment Kit Teaches Kids About Solar And Wind Power
Consider a Future Without Fossil Fuels
Power House provides an engaging introduction to regenerative energy sources while teaching basic concepts and principles in physical science. The kit focuses on the heat and light energy from the sun, the energy from the wind, as well as with electrochemical and plant energy. You will learn how to transform and use these forms of energy. With the Power House kit you can build a model house complete with solar panels, windmill, greenhouse, and desalination system. You can build and operate an electric train, windmill, solar cooker, solar hot water tank, hygrometer, electric motor, power hoist, sail car, and more! Plant watercress, prepare sauerkraut, and make chewing gum. Learn how plants convert sunlight into energy for your body and your engines.
The thoughtfully designed series of experiments was developed by physicist Uwe Wandrey. Professor Wandrey creatively integrates physical science and technology lessons with the adventure of building a home and living on a remote island. To survive, you must learn how to harness the power of the sun and the wind as well as tap the energy of other physical forces. The storyline follows the experiments in a stepwise fashion. Easy-to-follow activities make it fun to build models and use them for your experiments.
Experiments
Power House includes a 96-page full color manual with 70 experiments and 20 building projects, organized into these nine chapters:
- The Heat Trap: Construct and experiment with a greenhouse.
- The Sun Collector: Collect the sun's rays to heat water.
- The Sun Burners: Make a solar cooker while learning about the principles of light before you cook rice and bake bread.
- The Water Vampire: Desalinate water, plant watercress, produce sauerkraut and make chewing gum.
- The Heat Absorbers: Learn how heat of evaporation provides cooling, conduct experiments about air humidity, build a hygrometer and test a refrigerator.
- Power Plants: Grow beans, make a potted plant feed a candle, harvest sunflower energy, build an oil press, and assemble an oil lamp.
- The Energy Converters: Extract electric current from sunlight and metals in acid, build a light telephone, galvanize a nail and split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
- The Forces of Magnetism: Generate electric current with magnetic fields. Build a current indicator, electric and solar motors, a transfer switch, and a crane. Lift pencils with the sun and learn about levers. Build an electric car.
- Wings in the Wind: Build a sail car and learn how wings and sails transform energy. Learn to sail with the wind, by the wind, and against the wind and examine a mixed energy vehicle.
We hope that building small models such as are provided in Power House will inspire you to plan and construct something on a larger scale.
An Adventure in Sustainable Living
The Power House Experiment Manual is much more than just a set of instructions. The manual is organized around the story of a group of island dwellers who must learn a sustainable life using the resources available to them on their small island. As you read their journal entries and learn of their projects and experiments, you build models of the same projects and conduct the same experiments alongside them.
More than 20 different building projects in one kit!
EN-Genius Says...
 If you're an electronics professional, I'd guess that there's a good chance that you were originally lured into your profession by messing around with it as a kid -- perhaps starting out with one of those 100-in-one experimenter kits and eventually graduating to the harder stuff from Allied, Dynaco, or Heathkit. It's incredibly exciting to see that the educational toy maker Thames & Kosmos has come up with the equivalent sort of kit to help kids get excited about renewable energy technologies. Packaged as sort of a sustainable version of a Barbie Deluxe Dream House with a much better story line, T&K Power House should provide both young geeklings and more technically-challenged youngsters with hours of play that's almost guaranteed to keep the TV off and their minds in high gear.
If you are not familiar with T&K, they have a huge line of carefully-designed science kits that are designed to be really used by kids and not just tucked away on the shelf as trophy gifts. A couple of the more interesting T&K products that caught my eye were an incredibly clever microcontroller systems engineering kit for kids as young as 12, and a really slick medium-wave/shortwave vacuum tube radio kit that I'm thinking of getting Anwyn for her birthday.
But I digress…
 There are several other nice solar energy experimenter kits on the market already (I'll list a few later on), but the T&K kit separates itself from the pack in several important ways. Instead of using the traditional format that presents the experiment as an isolated activity, the Power House manual introduces activities as part of an adventure story about a small group of people learning to survive using only the resources available to them on their small island. Rather than read a dry lab manual, you read their journal entries which document their projects and experiments and then reproduce the same projects and conduct the same experiments in real life. It's sort of like a hands-on version of a multi-player immersive game, and probably just as addictive.
 While it's easy to capture the attention of us hard-core geeks with gadgets and isolated experiments, much of the real world engages much better when there's a narrative attached that ties together all the facts, figures, and experiences in a compelling way. One of the nicest examples of how the Power House kit does this is in the story line where the islanders learn to light their home with oil they extract from sunflower seeds using a press they build themselves. Other story lines involve using the solar and thermal collectors on the model house roof to do many different kinds of tasks, all of which help make a gut-level connection to how energy is captured, transformed, and used.
 With hope threatening to become as much of a rare resource as our dwindling oil reserves, it's great to find a fun and compelling educational toy like the Power House experimenter kit that gives kids both the tools and the attitude they'll need to be effective (and happy) global citizens. Once we've finished the hovercraft we've been working on for close to a year (it's taking much longer than expected!) I'll probably get one of these for my daughter. In fact, rather than just buying a kit for our family, I'll offer to get one for my kid's science teacher if she thinks she can find a place for this cool little toy in her syllabus for next year.
The Power House experiment kit is available now, with a list price of $149.99. Visits to the Discover This and Amazon web sites indicate that the actual street price runs between $110 and $129. One heckuva bargain if you ask me.
Appendix: More Green Tech Toys
For those who are interested in a more straightforward approach to renewable energy toys, here are a few alternative kits to consider:
Thames & Kosmos also makes a very nice Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit.
You can get a low-cost solar kit from our friends at American Science & Surplus.
Horizon Fuel Cell H-Racer kit lets you generate hydrogen fuel to power a zoomy little model car from ordinary tap water.
Horizon also makes a science fair version of the car and several other renewable energy experiment kits that give kids (and grownups) hands-on experience with solar cells, hydrogen generators, and fuel cells.
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