| Solar Projector Will Help Teach Reading | 0 comments |
 6 Dec 2005 @ 04:04, by Raymond PowersSolar Projector Will Help Teach Reading December 5, 2005 12:45 PM - Justin Thomas, Virginia Dec. 12, 2005 issue - Most adults in Mali can't read. The adult illiteracy rate is 80 percent, and for women in rural areas the rate jumps to 90 percent. But now, engineering students with Design that Matters, an MIT-based nonprofit, are literally shedding light on the issue with something they call Kinkajou, a solar-powered projector that can shoot an image up to three yards onto any flat surface. "There is a lot of excitement about it," says Jill Harmsworth, vice president of the Africa program for World Education, a nonprofit running literacy classes in Mali, where the product's been tested throughout the year. "Often there would only be a single light bulb and the women could barely see their books. [Kinkajou] has made people eager to come to class." The U.S. Agency for International Development has noticed. It's bankrolling an effort to take Kinkajous (named after an animal with exceptional night vision) to 1,500 more classes worldwide by the end of the year—and to 15,000 more by 2009. On this scale, it costs just $50 to make the projector and $12 to make a spool of film, which can store up to 10,000 pages of text. Entire reference libraries can now be transported cheaply and easily. In designing the product, the MIT students had an unlikely inspiration: Fisher-Price's toy projector, which they found to be the most battle-tested model around. "When you design things for kids, they have to be bombproof," says Tim Prestero, cofounder of Design that Matters. To withstand the conditions of the Sahara, the Kinkajou, like the toy projector, has seven plastic lenses instead of a single fragile one. The final product is tough—and it's lightening the load for thousands worldwide. |