Sustainable Ferris Wheel

Our Children
When I thought about sustainable education issue, a question came to my mind: If we want to teach kids some knowledge about sustainability, what is the first word, the first point we should mention? Children love toys, comics, and dolls, how could a boy be interested in sustainable issue, which is not even interesting to an adult? Though we know it is an important topic, most children do not care much about global warming, energy consumption, recycling material.


Sustainable Toy
If I can make something that can attract children's attention, and make them wonder what is sustainability, then I already made a successful first step. If kids can have fun and learn about responsibility toward a toy at the same time, the toy will be very very valuable. Following this principle, I start drawing sketches about interactive toys. The most fascinating one is a ferris wheel, something that boys and girls all love it, even young couple are interested in. Simply by combining the ideas of playing a small ferris wheel and taking care a plant, I want to create an interaction that helps kids learn about responsibility toward playing.


Marvelous Ferris Wheel
"If you can water these grass and take them to the sunlight everyday, they will respond you by start rotating the wheel!"

This ferris wheel with real grass doesn't take power plug in or battery to rotate, instead, it takes tender loving care. Taking care of it in form of watering it and sun it will generate kinetic power and solar power to make wonderful thing happen: it start rotating!


Working Mechanism
The wheel rotation is driven by two power source. The first one is solar power, with solar cell on it.






for project presentation, please click here:
http://www.itp.nyu.edu/~htt213/Sustainable_Energy/Toy_Presentation01.ppt.htm