Spänningssökarna (The Thrill-Seekers’ Contest)

The competition Spänningssökarna is structured in such a way that the participants must answer certain questions or specifications regarding queries such as: What might future energy solutions look like, and students are encouraged to come up with new ways to use renewable energy sources and new ways of living as energy efficiently as possible. The theme varies from year to year, but for example, the 2019 competition’s theme was “The Connected City”. It was encouraging the students to reflect upon how they might imagine the cities of the future to take shape and how to make them as energy efficient as possible. The contest was divided into six phases:¹

Phase 1: Registration Phase 2: Workshop Phase 3: Online Voting Phase 4: The Energy Council Phase 5: Presentation Preparations Phase 6: The Grand Finale

Examples of Projects

Water U Waiting 4

Class 9B at Bilingual Montessori School of Lund (BMSL) in Lund won Spänningssökarna 2019. The first prize, awarded by Kraftringen's CEO Sezgin Kadir, was a class trip to Berlin in February of 2020. The winning entry was named "Water U Waiting 4". This project-idea was a complex system of water towers that used groundwater to cool houses and industries while at the same time generating and storing electricity in an environmentally friendly way to flatten the curve of electricity demand.

The chairman of the jury was Kraftringen's President and CEO, Sezgin Kadir said:

After brainstorming with a group of 20 students with ideas such as creating an artificial tree creatively named YggdrasEL by the students (a compound of the words electricity and Yggdrasil, the sacred tree found in Norse mythology) that could capture and store the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere while generating electricity, the students started to debate and consequently merged different ideas into one project they called Water U Waiting 4. From the group brainstorming, they agreed to develop a way to store the excess energy that is produced mainly at night that will go to waste if not used in existing or new water towers by pumping cool ground water, when there is a surplus of renewable electricity on the network and by releasing it to activate small turbines to produce extra electricity, when the demand in energy is high. Meanwhile, the cool water that was stored in the water towers could be channelled into different industries, houses, or commercial buildings to cut the cost of air-conditioning during the heat waves in the summer, or when there is a need of cooling, like in the example of the servers that were in need of cooling. In this way, they would be creating a closed loop of ground water being pumped up in towers and later brought down by gravity to activate turbines and meanwhile cooling efficiently and cheaply to save even more energy by replacing the air conditioning with this new cooling technology, and finally the water will go back down in the groundwater and be pumped up again as a closed loop system that does not affect the environment or the quality of the water.

Once the team that started to develop this idea received the support of the rest of the class, everyone started to build smaller teams to work on different aspects of the project. Some students took the initiative of building a project model with Styrofoam, cardboard, textile, and recycled bits of plastic and foil. Their goal was to conceptualise what their invention would look like and how it would work at a smaller scale. A water tower was built, and to conceptualise the cycle of water, they used a blue LED light string that was powered by a battery in order to show the path of the ground water up to the tower down through the turbines and into the different industrial, commercial, or public buildings and houses as a loop system. The front drop that represented the ground and the groundwater was made out of textile, and students who were competent at sewing fixed that front drop, while other students started to carve Styrofoam and cover it with green paper to conceptualise grass, while yet other students were building miniature versions of houses and factories. In the end, other students started building a fence with recycled netting, and some students even went to the schoolyard to gather small stones and other natural materials to do some landscape architecture to make their model look as realistic as possible. With the goal of impressing the jury and the main sponsors of the event, some students even printed the logo of the energy company, laminated it, and pasted it on their model of the water tower that was, in the end, built from entirely recycled materials.

Meanwhile, another group of students were busy doing research to prepare the most convincing and inspiring presentation, but most importantly to be ready to answer any kind of questions from the jury. The presentation group was working on their stage performance trying to organise a script from the tips that they received from the research group.

Another group of students were working on producing a song and a music-video as an introduction to the presentation for the grand finale. They started by finding an existing song to which they added new lyrics and re-recorded the music and sang with different types of harmonies. After some research, the students decided to make a cover of a song by Nickelback, and they wrote the lyrics in English as an icebreaker for introducing their presentation. First they re-created the track with some digital drums, then they added a baseline and guitars, and, once their instrumental version was ready, five students recorded vocal tracks while singing the new lyrics of the song promoting their project. Together with the school’s music teacher, they made some arrangements, recorded overdubs with vocal harmonies, and mixed the song using the school’s computers. Once the song was mastered with the help of their teachers, the members of the work group took their bicycles during a lunch break to go to the large water tower in the north of the city to record some stock footage of them singing their theme song while goofing around and having a good time. When they came back, they edited their video while recording some studio footage of them playing instruments and singing together in the music room as well. Then, with the help of a video-editing program, they synchronised their video with the song that they recorded, and they ended up having a very catchy music-video introduction to their stage presentation.

Meanwhile, another smaller group of students worked on an informative video that used some simple computer animations, where they graphically explained how their invention would manage to flatten the curve between supply and demand of energy during daytime and night-time with the help of their energy-storing water towers and the cooling system. The method employed was to record a voice-over from the text that they wrote together and create the animations afterward together with relevant pictures in order to demonstrate the efficiency of their invention.

Of course, the students were invited to collaborate in more than one subgroup, so it was up to them to start in one group then finish in another and make themselves useful where they felt needed, so, in some cases, students started in the research group ended up singing in the theme song while also participating in the instruction video and contributing to the stage performance during the grand finale. Other students decided to specialise in one group only while putting all their efforts into building a model or writing the most catchy song, but nevertheless, even though they specialised in one group, they still learned by osmosis from the rest of the group, as the project included so many different school subjects, such as mathematics (when the students calculated the volume of water), physics (while working out the temperatures), or civic science and home economics (while budgeting the costs for the project), to name just a few.

As the grand finale of the contest always takes place at the largest arena in the city of Lund every year on a Sunday in November, our school has a tradition of having a dress rehearsal on the Friday afternoon before the weekend’s grand finale and in the year in question both classes 9A and 9B presented their solution for the contest in front of the rest of the school. As the students from 9B had been working on a solution to store energy without using batteries, they did some research around the projects that were going to be presented by the other schools during the finals. They also noticed that, with the exception of the idea of our school’s parallel class (9A), all the ideas of their competitors involved batteries, so the research group came up with a great idea to add an element of surprise in their presentation, in order to influence the jury in voting for their invention by pointing out the negative aspects of batteries. During the presentation a student crashed in and voluntarily disrupted his classmates on stage by grabbing a microphone to loudly complain that the idea was bad and that it would be simpler to just use conventional batteries to store the surplus of renewable energy; in this way, the students on stage were able to explain their choice to avoid using batteries for the sake of the planet’s future and also to prevent child labour in developing nations as well as the release of heavy metals in the environment, while undermining the arguments of the competitors without causing any trouble to their friends in 9A, as their invention did not discuss batteries.
During the grand finale on the Sunday, the students were up on stage behind the models that they had built, and they also brought an electric fan up on the stage as a prop to be used as an icebreaker to explain why they came up with this idea in the first place. By starting their presentation with the question: “Have you ever been in a classroom full of students at 30°C with only a simple electric fan for the whole class?” After posing this question, they started to explain why cooling or air-conditioning is more important than ever, especially in the context of global warming, explaining that the cost for air-conditioning and the use of energy for this purpose is extremely high on a global level. Even before the term “flattening the curve” became widely popular during the Covid-19 crisis, the students initiated the talk about how to flatten the curve regarding supply and demand in energy. This idea seemed to seduce the jury, and the students received a lot of very simple and easy questions that they answered without any difficulties, avoiding being too specific with numbers to show that their invention could be built at different scales.
But as we mentioned before, the most important thing, apart from possibly winning, is the journey from the first idea to the final presentation. What the students gained from such an integrative and sustainable learning experience is that they worked in a truly transdisciplinary way by including many different subjects: not only the three subjects that the teacher in charge of the project is responsible for, namely technology, geography, and history, but as the final presentation is in Swedish, they also involved the participation of the Swedish teacher to help them to polish their presentation and reflect on the quality of the language used. During the course of the presentation they also involved subjects such as physics, biology, chemistry, woodwork, art, textile crafts, civic education, and several other disciplines that are not necessarily included in the regular school curriculum.

The students most definitely improved their skills in engineering and their capacity for critical thinking during the course of investigating different aspects of economic management, programming, design, and video and music editing, but most importantly in team-building. To a certain extent, their linguistic skills were also augmented, as most of the websites that they consulted and other different sources of information that they used for research while they were brainstorming in the beginning were sources in English, French, or Spanish. As the quantity and quality of information regarding some of the topics covered in Swedish were not sufficient to answer all their questions, they used their multilingual skills in order to perform the research as an added value to the quality of their sources.

Another thing that should not be neglected is that the students learn about time management and how to prepare and make a reasonable schedule in order to meet a clear deadline both for the dress rehearsal and the grand finale on the Sunday. Everything has to be ready, tested, and under control to avoid unnecessary stress for the people in charge of the presentation. Furthermore, one thing that makes the teacher proud of this group is that every single student from the class showed up at the finale on time and eager to help with the logistics and to support their classmates on stage. Moreover, they encouraged and cheered for their friends in the other class, 9B, as much as they cheered for their own classmates. The team spirit spreads over their class boundaries, and the sense of belonging increases and goes way beyond their own class, and they show loyalty to classmates across the whole school.

Air Beef

The idea that won the third prize in the competition of the described year was not so much about saving or producing electricity but more focusing on the sustainability aspect and the environmental impact of global meat production. The students from 9B went through the same brainstorming process as their friends in the parallel class, and they also came up with a lot of different ideas, but the one that became the most popular was at first more of a joke that the students made about creating meat from thin air. After a couple of hours of research and discussion, some students discovered that an experimental technology had already been developed to produce some type of powder called Solein, which is an edible powder made from the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere that was produced through an electrolysis system.

At first, the students said that as the invention already existed, they wanted to try to find another idea, but some other students responded that it did not have to be the same thing, but that they could simply take inspiration from the idea and improve it. Nothing was, according to them, mentioned anywhere that the product Solein could be used to make meat, so another group suggested that by integrating the element of stem cell technology, the proposal might be improved. Yet another group talked about possible allergies, and in order to bring more vitamins into this new product, their project became some type of hybrid between the technology that was developed in Finland to capture the excess of CO2 in addition to the breakthrough in stem cell technology as well as the inclusion of the algae called spirulina in a mix to create artificial meat, in order to preserve and save more animals from being slaughtered for mass consumption.

The reflections that students made in their preliminary research really helped them to conceptualise and understand different aspects of biology, chemistry, physics, marketing, geography, transport, infrastructure, ethics, food distribution, lab practice, economy, biochemistry, business, and many other subjects needed to prepare a winning presentation, such as languages. In their research, they apply their knowledge of sustainable development as required in their geography classes, and they also make great use of some aspects from their civic education and most certainly from their technology classes. They also develop their skills in video and music editing, as they made and recorded a theme song for their presentation video by utilising a well-known song and juxtaposing it with their own lyrics explaining how their air beef system could turn the excessive CO2 in the atmosphere into artificial meat.

Another group prepared a video for the presentation with some explanation and some stock footage of lab and cell manipulation. Thereupon the presentation group decided to wear lab coats on stage, as their idea involved laboratory research and artificial meat production. It is worth mentioning that most students participating in the group that ultimately made the presentation on stage during the grand finale were in fact absolutely terrified at the outset about making an oral presentation in front of their own classmates. It is astonishing to think that they ultimately managed to make a high-quality presentation in front of hundreds of people. This opportunity helped students to surpass their own expectations and to increase their self-confidence. Something that contests like these can offer students, but that a regular school day cannot, is the adrenaline rush associated with performing on stage while representing their class, and this is also something that is going to produce more sustainable learning.

For the students to take pride in the fact that they discovered a way to reduce meat production while simultaneously reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere gave them a high level of confidence in the ethical and ecological aspect of their idea, even though some of their classmates were initially a bit sceptical that their idea was perhaps far-fetched. Eventually, most of the students understood that there are no stupid ideas and that every visionary in history was first considered as an eccentric fool, before their inventions became reality.

The proposed idea of Air Beef was not only meant to please the vegetarians or the vegan community, but also meant for people who enjoy eating meat. For the presentation, the students really put an emphasis on the different Global Goals of the United Nations to illustrate the fact that such an invention was needed in order to achieve some of the most important goals for 2030. One of the main arguments was the need to build these Air Beef factories, where there is an excess of CO2, such as for example in the centre of the largest cities, and the students stressed the fact that producing this type of food close to the places with large populations is beneficial, as it can reduce the environmental impact of transporting the meat from countries such as Brazil, New Zealand, the USA, or Italy. The economic and geographic aspect was non-negligible in their thought process, and the jury seemed impressed by the fact that the students had thought about this bigger picture of global trade in order to justify the fact that we ought to invest in a technology inspired by their idea. After the presentation, one of the jurors even said that the students were so convincing that they had renewed his hope for the future.

The Air Beef project received the third prize in the contest which gained them 20,000 SEK, and even before the students had left the stage, the students from the parallel class who had won the first prize of a trip to Berlin decided that they were willing to give away all their class savings in order to be able to bring the students from their parallel class with them to Berlin. They thought that their friends in the parallel class also deserved to get first prize, as the students had worked together in different teams, and they created a sense of solidarity within their class as well as with their friends outside of their class. This taught them the greater aspect of solidarity that goes beyond their own class. It made them feel responsible for their success as well, and both sets of students congratulated each other.

Needless to say, the trip that they made together really reinforced the bond between the students of both classes and everything they did in Berlin. All the museums that they visited and the different experiences that they had together there enhanced their learning further. Some of the things that they have learned, not only in preparing for this contest but also as a result of winning, will never be forgotten, owing to the fact that they are examples of sustainable learning. Just imagine the positive impact of visiting a concentration camp in Germany a week before an exam about World War II or visiting the DDR Museum just before starting the topic on the Cold War, just to name a few are things that contributed to the expansion of their knowledge greatly. Needless to say, the visit to Sachsenhausen’s concentration camp triggered the kind of emotional response that favours holistic learning, as previously described.

Trip to Germany

In conclusion, one thing that made these two classes perform so well was the fact that a huge majority of those students had had brothers or sisters competing in the same contest in previous years, and that they, as they were in 2nd grade, had seen the dress rehearsal of each class competing in this contest, and some of them even attended the grand finale as spectators in previous years just, because they were interested, and they were looking for inspiration for when their time would come to participate in this exciting creative contest. As explained before, participating in this contest has become a tradition at the school, and the pupils have been following this competition for several years, hoping that they will one day be able to take part, and hopefully win but, most of all, to gain the experience to participate in such an exciting competition.

Skyscraper Roof-top Aeroponic Farming

Up until the year 2019 both classes 9A and 9B from our school had been merged together as one group, and they competed as Class 9. This particular year, after some very fruitful brainstorming, where students came up with some different competing ideas, the students decided to explore the idea of vertical farming at the top of a skyscraper building while using aeroponics as a way to grow food in urban areas without using soil or a huge amount of water to grow vegetables for the local markets. Their idea reached the finals quite easily but did not finish in the top three during the grand finale despite a great presentation and a very impressive introduction video that the students had spent a lot of time preparing. Perhaps their original idea had some limitations, owing to the fact that rooftop farming already existed. Furthermore, vertical farming represents many challenges that are still waiting to be solved. The jury was a bit more critical about the idea of adding the extra weight to existing buildings and appeared to fail to understand the idea of urban farming, which is to produce food close to the great urban centres to reduce the economic and environmental cost of food distribution.

Notwithstanding this, the learning process had been extremely valuable for all the students involved, including the research group, the presentation group, and the video group. Their collaboration with the biology teacher had also been extremely rewarding. The project started with a decision to experiment with the idea of aeroponics and hydroponics at school to make it into an active learning experience. Unfortunately, the limited amount of time that we had to realise the project made certain shortcuts necessary, which will be described in more detail below.

The idea consisted of using the big school aquarium in the cafeteria to create a closed system, where the water from the aquarium would be used to water the plants in a huge container on top of a shelf over the aquarium using a pump system, where the water would be filtered through different layers and brought back into the aquarium while using the excrement from the fish in the big aquarium as a source of nutrients for the plants that would grow in the big container on top of the aquarium. The system worked perfectly, and we even managed to grow some greens and herbs, but we did not have access to the type of light needed in order to grow certain types of crops. Nevertheless, the students learned a lot by working in this experimental fashion. They made an instruction video to demonstrate how their fish tank worked and how the excrement of the fish would be used as a source of nutrients to grow vegetables in their school. Regrettably, they did not manage to convince the jury that their idea was the best one, and a school from the neighbouring municipality won first prize with a concept they called the Power Frame.

Despite the fact that the students had made a great presentation but that they had not won one of the top prizes they still received 10,000 SEK for their class savings which they ended up using to go on a class trip to Denmark at the end of the school year. Their teamwork was outstanding, and the fact that they had collaborated so much on different aspects of this project had helped most students to acquire a lot of new competences in the process. The presentation group adopted a strategy in order to sell their idea to the jury through having two characters playing the roles of investors who were interviewing the scientists who were trying to explain how this skyscraper rooftop agriculture would be beneficial for densely populated urban areas. The sceptical tone of the presenters was supposed to counterbalance and prepare the scientist for the type of questions that a jury might ask after the presentation. Once again, many different school subjects were involved in this project with active contribution from for example the biology teacher to make the hydroponic system work. The students will always remember that during their last school year and BMSL they managed to build a functioning hydroponic closed system while using an aquarium as a source of nutrients to grow plants in the school cafeteria.

The above is a perfect example of experiential learning. Needless to say, that it falls also in the category of active and relational learning and will definitely assist a sustainable learning process. Many different school subjects were involved once again in this project and in the whole process, and some extracurricular knowledge was needed in order to make the construction work. There is nothing in our school curriculum about teaching the students how to take care of aquariums or on how to farm on a small scale while using a system of pumps. But it became part of the holistic learning situation, and each individual moment became part of a whole, while the whole group managed to assimilate essential knowledge about the environment, sustainability regarding food production and distribution, energy-saving, and water consumption.

During the preparation process, before finalising their presentation, the students had the privilege of receiving a visit of an expert in sustainability, who gave them some valuable tips on how to further develop their ideas such as perhaps using larger surfaces and to grow food on a larger surface such as the rooftop of warehouses instead of using skyscrapers. Furthermore, they were offered the tip of using urine as a source of nutrient instead of fish excrement as a source of nitrogen, to grow some foods through alimentation on their roots.

And, similar to all previous years, the presentation coaches provided by the competition came out to the school to offer the students some tips on how to make a convincing presentation in front of the jury and in front of the hundreds of people who will show up at the huge arena on the Sunday of the finals.

S.A.L.T.

BMSL year 9, with their transdisciplinary project named S.A.L.T., won the contest Spänningssökarna in 2017 and consequently also a class trip to Berlin. The jury's motivation was: “From local to global, the students presented a solution adapted to the challenges of today and to the future. The class has considered several sustainability aspects and risks.”

The SALT project of 2017 must have been the most successful for our school throughout the years, because the jury was unanimous, and each member of the jury voted for this idea as their first-place prize. According to the student who came up with the original idea, his thought process started years ago, when he saw his older sister participate in the contest in the past. Weeks before we started the brainstorming process with his class, we can recall that he came to explain his idea during a field trip in a park, where he demonstrated with sticks and stones how his original idea should be considered and that he was sure that it was a winning idea for this contest.

He started by saying that he had seen on the news that a warehouse containing salt had burned and that the heat of the fire was stored into the salt and that the salt itself kept the heat for weeks, and he said that salt could in theory be used to store solar energy, if we concentrated enough at a focal point. He then went on to explain that some solar farms are doing something similar, where they boil water and turn turbines, but his idea was that the solar energy could be stored in salt, so that it could be preserved, and it would be a way to produce solar energy without interruption, even at night.

Needless to say, he was already on a mission to convince his classmates that his idea was the most convincing and that year the brainstorm process was pretty straightforward, as most of the class was unanimous that this was the idea that they wanted to promote and use as their idea for the competition. Nevertheless, a few audacious ideas did emerge from other groups who wanted to come up with alternatives. This led to an improvement of the original idea of storing solar energy. Subsequently, some students were attempting to think outside the box by inventing some type of battery-charging fidget spinners or beach showers that provide hot water through a system of pipes under the warm sand or special staircase that produced energy with piezoelectric sensor elements that convert movement into energy. Another group of students were contemplating improving the original idea, because the hot salt was supposed to boil water in order to power turbines, so they developed the concept by saying that seawater should be pumped and used in the system, as when it is boiled, it would be desalinated and purified to make seawater into drinkable water.

Philippe Longchamps

The research group started to develop this concept and integrated the original idea of preserving solar heat in molten salt, as they looked for every single possibility. They grew very confident with the fact that producing drinkable water while producing clean green energy was a winning idea. The idea of storing solar energy in salt was in itself quite revolutionary from the beginning, but to add the fact that they would have a by-product of drinkable clean water as a result of this electricity production really added an aspect that made their idea seem even more attractive. The emotional aspect that they brought to their presentation was extremely important, as they focused on the scarcity of water in some developing countries and the fact that some children are still dying from water-borne diseases in the developing world. They claimed that millions of people still did not have access to clean water or affordable electricity throughout the world, while our planet offers an almost unlimited amount of renewable energy from the sun and an infinite amount of water and salt to make the realisation of their invention possible. The idea of putting heliostats around a tower that would reflect the concentrated solar energy into a focal point, which is a big pile of salt, is fairly straightforward to explain, but what made it easier to conceptualise was the fact that the group that was in charge of building a model made a most outstanding construction to demonstrate how their system could work.

The students had borrowed a rotating whiteboard on wheels from the art workshop and had started to experiment with magnets to be able to stick different materials to it. After experimenting with different types of materials, the students had decided to use plates of Styrofoam on both sides and glue some magnets at the back of these Styrofoam plates to make them stick the whiteboard, so that they could flip it upside down to show the part of the power plant that they wanted to build from an aerial viewpoint and also from an underground viewpoint. However, they encountered a few obstacles, as they realised after a while that the weight of the Styrofoam was too much to hold in a stable fashion on the whiteboard that they had borrowed from the art class. They then came up with an ingenious solution, where they managed to screw the upper and lower parts of the Styrofoam plates together without damaging the whiteboard and without using glue.

Once these plates of Styrofoam were stabilised, they started to carve the Styrofoam in order to create a model of the coastline, but instead of using knives, the students started to experiment with an idea that has been tried in the past, which was to cut Styrofoam with a heated metal string. The idea worked perfectly in a well-ventilated room, and the students managed to use a power generator to create some type of short circuit in a metal string. At first, they tried with copper, but they soon realised that there was not enough resistance to create heat with that type of metal. By performing a few experiments, the students quickly realised that the most efficient material was a tiny guitar string that became extremely hot, because the resistance of this steel string was far greater than the copper string.

Once again, technological experimentation and trial and error led to one of the most optimal solutions for cutting the Styrofoam. Once the steel string was heated, it turned red, and it cut through Styrofoam like butter, and after that designing a coastline on the Styrofoam plate was pretty straightforward. Another group then started to build the tower that would conceptualise the condenser and the salt container, while other students were recycling old CDs to create mirrors that would be conceptualising heliostats, and yet another group started to paint Q-tips to look like trees to create a nice forest around the solar park, and everybody contributed to this huge model of more than 2m x 2m.

Using different tubes and LED wires, they highlighted the intake of salt water with some blue lights, and the boiled water that was going to the condenser centre and turbine with red LED light strings. Some electronic elements such as a power line with lights had been added, and there was also an attempt to mechanise a turbine to show movement, but this idea did not turn out to be efficient and was replaced by a simpler version of the original idea. The whole Styrofoam model was painted in a sand colour, and some students had the brilliant idea of using powerful glue and getting some real sand from the school yard to create a natural feel on the surface to conceptualise the aerial view and the underground view of the power station.

The research group also thought to add some supplementary elements to convince the jury that their idea was feasible, and they furthermore wanted to create an element of surprise in their presentation. Therefore they had the idea of creating some type of protest during the presentation to advocate animal rights and express their concern for the birds that would fly and risk being burnt by this solar power station. They also mentioned the fish that might be swallowed by the pipes and even questioned whether bats could become victims of windmills. In order to prevent this, the research group came up with an incredible solution to the dilemma. While doing research, they found out that some drones that looked exactly like a bird of prey could be activated remotely to fly around these solar power stations to scare the birds away and prevent them from being cooked by the concentrated heat of the solar arrays. During the live presentation in the finals, this element of surprise became extremely important as the students rushed in on stage and took over the microphone to ask questions, acting as if they wanted the project to fail, but with sound arguments they were eventually convinced that their invention was perfect for preserving wildlife while providing cheap and green electricity and drinkable water at the same time.

One of the most determined elements of the presentation was the fact that this invention was primarily orientated towards developing countries, but it could in theory work in northern latitudes as well. However, the focus was directed towards enabling developing countries to become more competitive on the global market by providing affordable clean energy and much-needed water. Furthermore, the presentation group stressed the fact that it could also translate into the creation of good jobs and infrastructure that would contribute to a faster development of the economies of these emerging nations.

These 9th graders won first prize in the competition and a class trip to Berlin for this idea, and once again the victory was not as important as the learning journey. What they learned in this team-building activity was definitely sustainable, as what they experienced throughout the process were things that the students will remember for a lifetime. This will have been an extremely enriching experience of conceptualising something as complex as this and explaining it in a simple way while using an extremely impressive model, and it will surely be something that the students will remember forever and talk about for years. Furthermore, the ensuing class trip to Germany included elements that gave their education added value; the different museums that they visited and even the experience of travelling as a group were forms of active learning and team-building. Travelling together reinforced bonds between the students, and as part of the first prize, there was a day trip to a plus energy village south of Berlin, where the students learned a lot about sustainability and energy production. The students had the chance to see how biogas was created, how windmills worked, and they even got to go inside a huge, 100m-high windmill. They also had the opportunity to experiment with solar panels and participated in different workshops to learn more about sustainable green electricity production.

Drakkraft

The project as part of the Thrill-seeker’s contest for the year 2016 was called Drakkraft (Kite Power). Similar to the projects previously described, the sustainable, holistic, and active learning process was absolutely outstanding. This project won the second prize and SEK 30,000.

Drakkraft Photos

After a very fruitful brainstorming session, the students decided to create energy while using some type of reel system, where a kite would be flying in the upper layers of the troposphere while attached to a cable that was reeling a turbine, producing energy, and this flying wing would also be equipped with solar panels and windmills to constantly produce electricity through a long graphene wire attached to a base station. This audacious idea took form in class as the students were doing research about alternative ways of capturing wind power in a place where the wind was constant. By using the jet stream as a main source of energy, it was easy to explain how this flying object could remain in the sky while creating tension in the reel at the base station while producing electricity as it reels up and down, all the while capturing the sun above the clouds. As its spinning windmills attached to the wing at high velocity, the team that was in charge of building the prototype managed to create a wooden wing with solar panels attaching three smaller windmills at the back of the wing that were powered by a battery to conceptualise the constant movement of the wind and even attach small green and red lights as warning signals for the airplanes. The students even built a smaller model using a retractable dog leash in order to explain how the reel system would work and produce electricity in real time. They managed to demonstrate how it worked on stage while pulling the string and releasing it at will. They also explained how safe the invention would be, as the wing could be tele-guided to a safe landing patch, if the cable was severed by accident.

The presentation group for this project decided to use the talkshow approach, where a host was asking a group of engineers about their new invention. An introduction video was made that resembled a breaking news broadcast that was supposedly televised in the future, so that the whole presentation appeared to occur ten years into the future, while the presenters pretended to be employees of the company that was sponsoring the event. The creative aspect of this strategy for the presentation was very interesting, because it put emphasis on the feasibility of the project, as the students were projecting themselves in the future as engineers working for the energy company Kraftringen.

The multidisciplinary aspect of this presentation included some theatrical elements, and the students also designed t-shirts to look as if they were employees of the company sponsoring the event with an original logo of their tight energy system that was designed by the group of students in charge of graphic design, where they printed the logo on the back of their t‑shirts.

The students used the money that they won with their second prize to go on a class trip to the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.

Golfströmmen

The Gulf Stream project included the same sustainable holistic active learning aspect as the examples previously mentioned. However, during the initial brainstorm phase a few ideas that seemed to be more feasible or original were not considered by the class. In these instances, it is important for teachers to respect student democracy and let them decide which project they want to support. With experience, teachers should always be careful to allow the sort of democracy where the vote depends more on a popularity contest between students than on an ingenuity contest.

The whole of this project was a tremendous learning experience for the entire group. The group of students in charge of the presentation prepared a very convincing demonstration and a nicely designed model of the underwater generator, but the main obstacle in the way of this idea was the distance from the generator to the consumer. The power lines that would be located on the seabed were seen as one of the weak points of the idea. Their idea was to take advantage of the perpetual underwater current in order to create constant energy from the bottom of the sea. But as the students were aware that their idea was not necessarily the most original one, after doing more research they realised that a lot of different tidal power systems were being developed in Scotland, France, the USA, and even in Japan. Because of this, they some hope of winning first prize, but they put a lot of effort into making a very nice presentation. The students made some convincing video footage using time labs and maps in order to explain where these currents were located and how they would be able to produce constant energy and how to distribute this energy as well. With the aim of creating a lasting impression on the jury, the class decided to perform a live song as an introduction that was taken from the Swedish version of a Disney movie. The song was the Swedish version of Under the Sea, and one student played guitar as the rest of the class was singing along together with different huge cartoon sea creatures that they had made in their art class to create some type of entertainment effect at the beginning of their presentation. After presenting their idea during the grand finale the jury asked a few questions that our students deemed irrelevant, and they answered them quite arrogantly, which did not help their cause.

The students did not manage to finish in the top three in that year’s final, but the students were really happy with the experience that they gained from participating in this contest and once again; it is not about the final results but about the journey, the learning experience, and the team-building that this activity represented which has a long-lasting influence on each student participating in the project. While the students get a chance to develop their talents in different disciplines including art, video editing, music, languages, engineering, and presentation techniques, they have the opportunity to use a lot of the skills that they have developed throughout their school years in their attempts to convince a jury that their ideas should be considered as one of the solutions for the future energy needs of Planet Earth.

Kelp Help

This project was extremely enriching for the students, despite a disappointing second place in the competition. The idea was to produce biogas while cleaning the Baltic Sea, and this idea was very inspiring. The main idea was to create an artificial underwater kelp forest like the one found along the coast of South Africa in the depths of the Baltic Sea, where the sea life has slowly disappeared, owing to the bad quality of the water. The idea to filter the water with the use of the fast-growing algae called kelp was in itself a very good solution. Then by developing a system to grow it and crop it efficiently while using a system of boats and ropes, it felt like they had a very good and convincing project. The idea of cropping the fast-growing kelp and using it to create biogas was a noble idea, but there was such a huge number of details, and after doing all the research about this topic, the students did not manage to explain everything there was to explain in less than ten minutes. They talked for more than 13 minutes, and they were lucky not to be disqualified by the jury for over-running.

KelpHelp BMSL

However, in terms of sustainable learning, this project must have been one of the most enriching that we have taken part in, because, as part of geography and biology, there were so many aspects to be taken into account, that the general knowledge of the students in this group was increased greatly – for example, the class discussion they had around this extremely inspiring project. The students felt concerned about the quality of water, and this has a direct impact on everybody’s lives. They were also thinking in terms of alternative renewable forms of energy that could lower the price of biogas. By mass-producing biogas in the nearby sea, the students explained in their presentation that if it could work on a local level here in the countries around the Baltic Sea, the technology could easily be exported to other places facing the same type of challenges. An example could be the South China Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, and even any parts of the ocean where it is not too deep. The kelp would be used as a water filter while creating an incredible amount of biogas. Once brought back to land, the technical aspect of this invention was extremely interesting, because the kelp was basically grown from a rope system that could be dropped and lifted by simple boats, so that the plant itself was not planted at the bottom of the sea but basically left to grow on some type of “Plantage” attached to a rope that could easily be lifted and reeled into a boat that was cropping the grown kelp while replanting a new spur on the rope, before it is laid down again at the bottom of the sea.

The presentation did not have any theme song or video, except for a short animation that was made by a student to explain how the rope system would work. A lot of importance was placed on the natural science aspect of this project and the sustainability question that we had talked about in their geography course. We received some support from the School’s Swedish teacher for the quality of the presentation and some help from other colleagues, but the main area of focus was engineering and technology. The model that the students made of the biogas factory was very advanced. Unfortunately, that year the students did not feel that their idea was taken seriously enough, even though they were so passionate about making it happen in reality. They believed in their idea so much that they decided not to give up and to use their project to participate in another contest that was called “Gnistan”. They rebranded their system and made a few smaller adjustments to their prototype that looked like a fish tank made of recycled material to better explain their idea in simple terms.

One of the main lessons that the students learned with this multidisciplinary active learning approach is also the great life lesson of not giving up when you truly believe in something. They managed to win the first prize with this idea in the other contest in which they participated, and they were very proud of their achievement and happy to see that someone took their ideas seriously, as they felt passionate about their solution to save the Baltic Sea while producing biogas for the future.

Volcano Energy

This volcano energy idea was probably the most audacious that our students have been involved in, and leading this project was exceptionally inspiring, because the students showed extreme resourcefulness, and the group was driven by an unmatched artistic creativity. The idea was to make some type of extreme geothermal system, where they would drill into volcano vents on the slopes of a mountain to extract lava into titanium pipes to boil water and activate turbines to produce incredible amounts of electricity and also create a by-product of volcanic rock bricks that could be used for construction.

Volcano-Energy

The boldness of drilling into a very unstable volcano vent such as their chosen one in Italy did not convince the jury, but they managed to win the second prize because of the quality of their presentation and the overall involvement of the whole class in the transdisciplinary presentation that they designed. The type of research that the students performed really contributed to their understanding of different aspects of geophysics and technology, and years after competing with these ideas, some experiments were made in the real world, and this is now seen as much more feasible.³ It is quite amusing to realise that this group that was so convinced about their ideas and produced such a good presentation, but were told by the jury that their idea was too audacious and impossible to carry through, had one of the only ideas that really took shape and is applied in practice today, despite the fact that it sounded very far-fetched in 2013.

The way in which the students prepared this particular presentation included a lot of different subjects, but as I mentioned previously, this group was extremely artistic, and as they brainstormed for ideas to create the most impact during the presentation, they all agreed that they would make a live musical performance during the introduction to present their extremely advanced model of the volcano, while including some kind of theatrical setting to really delight the audience with a mesmerising introduction. One of the students’ initial ideas came from the ancient cult that worshiped volcanoes in the South Pacific. A group of students started to design tiki masks and costumes to pay tribute to the people who worship the volcanoes around the world, and then they designed a curtain to hide their model behind. As they were playing the introduction song the curtain was released, while a student was striking a Chinese gong. The students had composed some live music that included drums, an Indian sitar, and an electric guitar. The composition was inspired by ethnic music that the students had heard. The students composed this music trying to represent different cultures built around legends about volcanoes. In a way, this musical and theatrical introduction was perhaps a bit over the top, but it was nevertheless a great way to integrate a lot of different school subjects in their project – not only music but also textile design, crafts, a lot of research in geography and religion and, of course, while building the big volcano model, the students worked with different aspect of technology, crafts, woodwork, and even physics in order to achieve their goals.

This was the first time that these students needed to find an efficient way to cut through Styrofoam, and just like in the example mentioned previously, this was the first time that these students experimented with a hot wire to cut through the Styrofoam. The massive volcano that they built was a pile of Styrofoam plate that was glued with silicon, and they needed to carve a volcano vent to make a huge glass cylinder at the centre of a volcano that they were able to split open to show the interior, where they recreated lava with fruit juice and LED lights. They demonstrated how the lava would be extracted from the volcano vent and brought to a power station facility downhill; these factories were made with Lego blocks that were directly built into the Styrofoam structure, which was painted green, grey, and white, to visualise a dramatic volcanic mountain. Just as in the previous example, the students did not feel that they deserved to win second prize.

Another lesson that they learned from working together with this relational learning experience was to never give up. They were initially very confident that their idea was good, and they felt that they were not taken seriously because of the audacity of their creation. A couple of months after receiving the second prize in the finals, the students decided to record a video about their invention while including a flash animation made by two of the students, and they decided to send this new presentation about their invention to another contest with another energy company from the region, where they did subsequently win another prize, which contributed to the consolation of getting a second prize instead of first, as they had been hoping for. As the students were doing research for this project, they learned so much, ranging from at which temperature titanium melts to what type of material you could use for cooling different types of volcanic ashes and rocks. So the students learn a lot about geology simultaneously to learning about technology and the environment, the business aspect of electricity production, and also how to collaborate and learn from each other and, very importantly, not to give up, when you believe in what you are doing.

Global Solar Power Network

The very first year this contest took place, our school participated and managed to win first prize. At that time first prize was a class trip to London and a visit to the Science Museum there. During their initial brainstorming session, a few students started trying to find ideas to generate solar power for the whole planet on a 24-hour basis. This was because the problem they identified was the fact that it was impossible to create solar energy at night, and they suggested that they could develop some type of global solar network with a new smart grid to distribute solar energy that would be mainly produced at giant solar farms at the north and south pole. However, in order to access sunlight on a 24-hour basis in those solar captors, they came up with the suggestion of creating a sort of anchored satellites at the poles that were redirecting the solar light directly to the panels all day long, in order to concentrate solar energy from space into a beam that was aiming at these power stations 24/7. As the students were doing their research they learned that electricity distribution is more efficient in colder climates, so by starting their network from the north polar regions and Antarctica, the high-tension electricity could easily be distributed with the help of underwater power lines all the way to existing networks in Europe, North America, Asia, and even Australia and Africa through underwater cables or high-voltage powerlines while using laser technology to stabilise satellites that are stationary and redirecting sunlight to the power stations.

The students made a simple but clear presentation of their ideas with a great multimedia introduction that included some time-lapse animation made by hand as they were sketching the idea with a regular pencil. The jury awarded them first prize, despite the fact that they said that their idea was a bit far-fetched and hard to implement in the real world. Nevertheless, they said that it was an idea worth considering and that there were no stupid ideas, and that this concept might eventually lead to something else, so the students were still very proud of what they had accomplished and, needless to say, what they have learned in the process has been extremely valuable. This was a great example of long-lasting knowledge has been acquired by the whole group.

Leonard Sommer

Obviously, the role of teachers is essential in these projects. They have an opportunity to have a very real and significant impact on the rest of their students’ lives. They can employ some team-building and inclusivity-enhancing techniques derived from sports psychology in any project-based learning activities attempting to solve real-life problems in teams. Teachers play the role of facilitators, mentors, and motivators, as well as tough coaches and unyielding sources of knowledge. Project-based learning often ends up igniting life-long passions and interests within students, and it provides an excellent opportunity for teachers to assess the qualitative rather than the quantitative, as the true measure of success is in the progress of the students.

1. https://www.spanningssokarna.se/hem/
2. Article in Sydsvenskan, 1 October 2018, https://www.sydsvenskan.se/native/spanningssokarna-kraftringen/2018-10-01/de-involverar-alla-amnen-i-tavlingen-sa-har-de-lyckats-ar
3. See https://www.livescience.com/57833-scientists-drill-volcano-core-geothermal-energy.html