At this month’s Saturday Club, prospective girl engineers were working hard at learning about energy. The young ladies from four secondary schools who are majoring in Engineering science came to the SLIE Secretariat on 9 April 2016, and were entertained and learned from Ing Trudy Morgan about construction and what considerations need to be made when doing construction. After a brief introduction, including Ing Georgette Greene and Ing Chaytor and a friend of Georgette’s, it was time to start the session.
Ing Chaytor took over introducing the session on renewable energy with a video featuring renowned entrepreneur and inventor – Ms. Jessica O. Matthews who invented a generator from a soccer ball – called Soccket. She is the founder and CEO of UnChartered Play. It was a short showcase of how kinetic energy could be used to generate electricity through fun tools like a soccer ball and a skipping rope. The soccket can power lights for several hours after a short time of play and the skipping rope can generate up to 3 hours of light after just a short time of skipping. She owns 12 patents now.
Afterwards our special guest, Master Brian Sankoh, a pupil from St Edwards Secondary School, displayed his invention – an automatic call device. This stirred a lot of interest from the girls present. A few of them asked some questions about it and we looked at the inside circuitry of the invention. He explained that his purpose for developing it was to enable people to switch all lights off at home by a simple phone call when one may have forgotten to turn them off and similar reasons.
Then the exciting part came….. All the pupils present were put into groups of 3 and each group was given a yard of electrical cable, a 13-amp plug, a lamp holder, a screw driver and some pliers. They were given a picture of how to wire a plug. Ing Chaytor explained that the cable size and quality can be seen from the side. Each pupil was asked to look at the electrical cable.They identified that it was a 1.5mm EU cable. She also taught them what live, neutral and earth wires were and what they were for. They learned the typical colours of each of these wires.
She then demonstrated to them how to strip the cable with the pliers. Our special guest, Brian Sankoh also assisted groups in stripping their cables. They learned how to unscrew the different terminals and insert the wires in each respective location. With all hands on deck, Ing Georgette Greene, her friend, Ing Morgan and the teacher from Annie Walsh Memorial School all pitched in to assist with the exercise. Imagine the glow on their faces as each team came up to show how their own project worked. Each group of 3 pupils came up and posed proudly for the camera as they plugged in their 13-am plugs into an extension cable and put a bulb into the lamp holder at the other end and the lamp came on.
