Ghanaian children are in the dark.

With no electricity available in rural schools, there is no light in the classrooms, making reading impossible and forcing students to learn by memorizing everything the teacher says.

Discovery Channel Canada recently aired a segment they filmed about BYU's involvement in helping to improve work and play conditions for Ghanaian school kids.

"These kids in Africa don't have much of anything. The one thing they do have is kit power," said Ben Markum, president of Empower Playgrounds. "So we're going to take kit power to make electricity to power the lights."

Markum served a couples mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana and discovered that most of the schools there did not have electricity. Markum returned to the United States with his own mission in mind. He envisioned giving light to the Ghanaian schools using power-generating merry-go-rounds.

He founded Empower Playgrounds, a non-profit organization to turn his dream into a reality. He returned to his alma mater and challenged BYU engineering students to come up with a design.

"The concept is to enhance education. We do that by giving kids something fun to play on." Markum said. "We can also attract kids to come to school."

Children turn the merry-go-round that is attached to a generator, which was built for windmills. "It's like a car transmission. Your tires are not going as fast as it says they are. The transmission takes the fast rpm and slows it down. We however are taking a slow rpm and gearing them up." Markum said.

The power from the generator is saved to a battery with enough of it to light up a classroom. The merry-go-round generates a little bit of electricity so it needs to be in a lot of use. Markum, however, said he does not want the technology to stand in the way of fun.

"There was no incentive for the kids to come to school. There's no playground equipment and nothing to have fun with. During the recess time, they'd go out and draw designs in the dirt with their bare feet and play games like hopscotch." Markum said.

Markum wanted to produce lights in the classroom in a way that allowed them to have fun at school, while also giving the children an incentive to come to school.

A team of manufacturing engineers is currently working on finalizing the design of the merry-go-round to take over to Ghana the second week of April.

"Our major [manufacturing engineering] involves figuring out how to make things cheap and of high quality," said Wayne Funk, one of the team members.

The team will build one merry-go-round in Ghana in April, but more importantly they will set up a facility where Ghanaians can produce these merry-go-rounds for themselves.

BYU's job is to figure out a plan as to how they can manufacture the merry-go-rounds in Ghana. This has proven to be a challenge because there is a major disparity of resources between the U.S and Ghana. The team and Markum have been working with Kweku Anno, a mechanical engineer in Ghana to discuss the availability of resources.

Anno visited Provo last September to inspect the proto-type merry-go-round. Materials were sent to him in Ghana, where he built one with slight modifications.

The merry-go-round was installed in an upper level school in the capitol of Ghana for security reasons. The response to the merry-go-round has been phenomenal.

Upon seeing the proto-type, Anno thought the merry-go-round would be a great instrument for students in schools to have a better understanding of technology.

A curriculum is currently being developed to teach Ghanaian students the basic elements of physics and principles of technology.

Professor Shumway, BYU associate professor of technology engineering education, is developing a curricular unit together with his TEE 378 practicum class.

"We are developing a curriculum framework. We don't want to take something and impose it on them," Shumway said. "We want the teachers in Ghana to add insight and develop a curriculum based on the needs of Ghanaian children."

They have created lessons in solar energy, magnetism and the generation of electricity. They want to take students through the entire energy cycle and will develop lessons that explain how energy from the sun can be transformed to the electricity used to for lights.

The whole idea behind the merry-go-round is to educate children. Not just about electricity, but about how to learn and how to solve problems.

Copyright Brigham Young University 6 Feb 2008