On April 18th, STBE Solar Club students Jenna Carlile, Gloria Fleming, and Emma Watkins joined Dr. Jeremy Ferrell at the Children’s Playhouse’s annual BuildFest event at Watauga High School, a free STEAM event for kids ages 2-12. Their table, What Is a Watt? hosted hands-on energy demonstrations, including hand-crank generators and a KidWind make-your-own wind turbine workshop.
At their table, kids learned how electricity can be generated from mechanical energy in the form of rotational motion. They tested how different electrical loads create different resistances and the mechanical force required. For example, a 50W bulb is difficult to sustain with a hand crank generator. This is the average power consumption of a laptop.
Kids were then able to apply these ideas to wind turbines by creating and decorating their own blades and then testing them with a large box fan and a multimeter to find the voltage, and current they were able to produce. They saw firsthand how blade size, pitch, and shape changed how effective their turbines were compared to each other with a leaderboard. When looking at the scores, they saw that those who connected their turbine to a red light had an average voltage of about ~2.5V, and those who used the blue light had an average voltage of ~3.3V, learning that different light colors operate at different voltages. Surprisingly, the highest voltages (2x of the average!) came from kids who made unbalanced turbines, with one very large blade and 2-4 smaller ones, but these were also the turbines that fell apart after a few revolutions- kids are great experimenters! Nurturing this curiosity while fostering an appreciation of energy use around us is core to the mission of the App State Solar Club.
BuildFest 2026 thumb
BuildFest 2026 thumb