William had started to develop the wind turbine at age fourteen.  But, more interesting than that were the events that led up to that point in time.  Not every child in Malawi goes to school.  William was one that understood the opportunity he had when his family was able to enroll him in a primary school.   He was a hard worker in school and seems to have appreciated every bit of knowledge that came his way through his formal education experience.

By about the time he finished the eighth grade in 2001-02, severe famine had struck the country.  His family, being agrarian, could no longer support the fees required for William to keep attending school.  The book describes in great detail how William and his family got through those two years, surviving on just a few bites of food, if even that, per day.

The first thing we can learn from William’s story is about motivation. The severe famine that had hit and the hunger pains he literally felt made him wonder about solutions to the problem.  He thought that if he could find a way to irrigate the crops that he could help solve the problem. But, to do that you’d need power to pump the water.  So, William was more motivated to solve a problem than perhaps anyone could possibly be.

When William set out to learn about energy and power he came across several textbooks on related topics. I think many people miss the true genius of William. It wasn’t as if the text materials he read contained a set of plans that explained how he could build a wind turbine from materials laying around a village in a developing country.  What William did was he  applied the sort of ingenuity I wish every one of our children could develop.  He read about the concepts and then set out to find the things that fit his needs…an old bicycle dynamo to serve as the generator…old automobile parts and metal garnered from trips to the scrap yard…some other tools and parts from his father’s farming materials and others from around the house.  From these “unusable,” even in a developing country, items he fashioned a full power generation system complete with a circuit breaker. Imagine the pride and delight he must have felt when the family radio powered up for the first time with electricity from his wind turbine.

Our young people can learn a lot from an individual like William Kamkwamba and the stories he has to tell. I’d say the book is definitely appropriate for a high school level student on up through adults.

You can also learn more about William in his own words from this TED Talk and this short documentary called Moving Windmills.

Dr. Grandin’s most well-known technological achievement is the ingenious design of sweeping curving corrals for animals being moved to slaughter.  Above all this design demonstrates her understanding of ethics and social responsibility, which is important for all young people to understand.  The design also demonstrates a high understanding of technological systems and how their component parts interact.

Dr. Grandin also understands her own strengths and challenges.  In light of her autism, she needed to learn how to communicate the great ideas that she was easily able to visualize (see her book Thinking In Pictures).  Actually drawing her ideas was something that she needed to work hard to learn and develop.  Further, as she was challenged to communicate verbally, she needed to learn how to sell and pitch her ideas in drawings much more than words.

I really appreciate what Dr. Grandin has to say in her TED talk about how we are losing the importance of hands on courses in our schools.  My feeling is that the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of traditional education and associated standardized testing that was designed for the turn of the 20th Century.

Our students can learn a lot from the ingenuity of Dr. Grandin and we need to work on developing the understandings she has of systems, ethics, and communication in our young people.  The movie is appropriate for a high school audience and our future teachers can take a lot from reading and viewing her materials.