7/28/2023
An educational team led by Materials Science and Engineering professor Leslie Allen assisted students in Browning, Montana, home of the Blackfeet Tribe Reservation, who built their own wind turbine, under the NSF’s Broader Impacts initiative.
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The Blackfeet community is the 10th largest Native American tribe in the U.S., numbering about 20,000 people mostly living near Browning, Montana. The COVID-19 pandemic was devastating to the Blackfeet community, losing many of their elders who are key in preserving their ancestry. At one-point the Blackfeet had more than three times greater COVID-19 death rates compared to the rest of the people in Montana.
The situation was so severe that they needed to lock down the entire reservation, including the adjacent national park entrance. Now, they have recovered, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is able to continue a partnership with the tribe. Blackfeet Community College and Browning Public Schools provide opportunities for people to share the Native American culture with Western culture through education. The partnership offers Illinois an opportunity to share a bit about our engineering culture with them.
Materials Science and Engineering professor Leslie Allen organized a science camp there with his student group that also represents MRL and CSL. This year’s visit was the group’s third to Browning. The team visited a local classroom of 24 students from seventh and eighth grade to explore the simple but natural potential of wind energy.
The science camp started with a short lesson about how to generate electricity from wind power through Faraday Law, along with a demonstration using coils and huge magnets (1,500 pounds). Then each individual student built their wind turbines and demonstrated their function by powering LEDs and buzzers through the wind power of each turbine. This hands-on approach allowed the students to gain a practical understanding of renewable wind energy systems, which could potentially benefit their Blackfeet community as there are rich local wind power resources.
“We built over 20 wind turbines powering LEDs, and experienced how wind can be converted into electrical energy,” said Melody Small, a native reservation tribal member and physics teacher with the Browning School District. “Thank you for coming all this way for my kids.”
Small hosted the camp, and noted that the innovative hands-on approach made the camp unique. Each student was equipped with Dremel drills, screwdrivers, magnets, compasses, coils, and their own voltmeters. Students took ownership of their finished product and brought home the turbines as well as their own voltmeter.
“We are committed to fostering an inclusive scientific community, and our partnership with the Blackfeet community is a significant step toward achieving this goal,” Allen said. “The natural curiosity and eagerness to learn displayed by the students is truly inspiring.”
The Illinois team included Illinois Ph.D. student Jie Zhao, Jonas Kurniawan of Stanford University, and Lu Yan of Purdue University.
Allen and Zhao’s efforts at Illinois are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its Broader Impacts initiative. The team plans to continue its educational outreach in the future, spreading knowledge and passion for renewable energy to more students across the country.
Award Number:1809573
Project Title: Local Atomic-level Thermodynamic Probe for Nanoscience of 2D Membranes: Synthesis, NMR and Nanocalorimetry
Study Report Type: Annual Project
Report PI: Leslie Allen
Awardee: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Program Officer Name: Birgit Schwenzer
Program Officer Email: bschwenz@nsf.gov
Program Officer Phone Number:(703)292-4771