EWB workshop!

The view from the entrance

Today I helped out with an Engineers without Borders (EWB) workshop. The idea was to have a bike powering a projector, showing Family Guy episodes (a student favourite!). However, there were some problems with the dynamo we bought, so we couldn't get it to work in the end.
We had other stalls up to show other parts of EWB. These included:






- Outreach work: EWB goes into schools and teaches them about appropriate technology for developing countries. The main things being shown today were a bridge made of straws and a water filtering device made of a bottle, some gravel and some sand!
- Projects: there was a stall explaining the goal this year of a renewable-powered water pump to address the imbalance in water levels in some lakes on campus.
- Training: A back-to-basics look at mini wind turbines to understand how they work, and different design choices to do with their construction (like number of blades).

Mini-wind turbine stall

There were also meant to be leaflets available, but the printers let us down so we didn't have them! A pity really, as I think they were well-designed (but then, I designed them so that's understandable..)
I've uploaded a pdf of the leaflet, so anyone can look at the information. It is a three panel leaflet, so may make more sense if you print it off (two sided) and fold it up, but all the info is there on the pdf. The link is here.

All in all, it was a good experience and although there weren't many people around, it was a good initiation into the world of EWB! Hopefully I can continue to get involved in the next few months while I'm still at Warwick, and potentially after I've left.