An all-girl engineer team invented a solar-powered tent for the homeless in the US.
The 12 teen girls from San Fernando High School worked on their invention for an year and presented it at MIT in June as part of a young inventors conference.
The girls had never coded, soldered, sewn or 3D-printed before but joined forces and won a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program to develop the invention. They were all recruited by DIY Girls, a NGO teaching girls from low-income communities topics such as math, science and engineering.
“I knew I wanted to apply for it, but I needed a team,” says Evelyn Gomez, 29, the executive director of DIY Girls to Mashable. “I went back to my calculus teacher at my high school and did a hands-on recruitment activity.”
The teens quickly became quite independent relying on trial and errors to improve their prototype with the help of YouTube video and Google.
“You’re learning new things you’ve never even heard of or even thought of,” says Chelly Chavez, who learned the programming language C++ to get the technical aspects of the tent to behave according to Mashable.
With button-powered lights, USB ports and even sanitising UVC light, the tent is completely solar-powered.
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