Bright New Ideas » Bright New Ideas Updates

Upcoming on Bright New Ideas!

kyle — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 03:37:06 +0000

Patrick and I had a conference call today for nearly an hour about what we will be doing while he is in Nicaragua. Patrick will be leaving on March 8th and be gone through the first week of April. We’re having some quick meetings before he leaves to decide what we will be doing while he is working there. Rest assured, there will be a lot of activity on the blog and in the media!

We will be meeting on Monday to film some descriptions of what Patrick will be doing in Nicaragua. We will be having polls on the website giving you the opportunity to affect Patrick’s travels. There will also be pictures of the work he’s doing there. Make sure to keep watching this blog for the upcoming month, there will be a lot going on!

Bright New Ideas Work With University of Minnesota

patrick — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:53:44 +0000

Bright New Ideas has teamed up with a University of Minnesota Institute of Technology class to better engineer the design for the Bright New Ideas solar lamp, known as the “Tega Lamp,” named after the project location of Jinotega in Northern Nicaragua. This lab course will undergo a multi-week process to improve the design and production of the lamp. More updates on this project will come soon.

Dim Outlook

aaron — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:05:41 +0000

Today’s La Prensa (national Nicaraguan newspaper) reports that the working age population grew by 70,000 people between 2001 and 2005. It’s estimated that by 2010, an additional 118,000 new workers will come of age to enter the workforce.

Great – more hands to work! Wait a sec: Nicaragua lags far behind the rest of Latin America in education. According to the article’s subheading, many Nicaraguan children don’t finish elementary school – city kids make it to 4th grade and children from the exterior reach just 2nd (I assume these are dropout averages; unfortunately, this report gives no specific numbers or statistics).

Economist Adolfo Acevedo Vogl identifies the problem: that this enormous mass of youth is entering and – without drastic change – will continue to enter the labor market with an extremely low level of education. The result? They won’t find decent employment, social discomposition will continue, as will migration, and Nicaragua’s poverty dilemma becomes worse with no forseeable solution.

What if there were a way to help education get better in Nicaragua? Instead of imagining the impact of 118,000 uneducated workers entering an economy (the horror!), let’s imagine 118,000 educated and empowered workers joining the ranks of Nicaraguan society. What a tremendous potential for change!

Listen: It’s no secret to Nicaraguans that they have urgent poverty problems. And it’s no secret to Nicaraguans that education is the key to a brighter future. What stands in the way is opportunity; they need to give their youth opportunities to develop into the free-thinking, sound-reasoning individuals that every human being deserves the right to become.

Opportunity lives in a spark of light.

The solar lamps from Bright New Ideas create opportunity because they bring light into a child’s evening, so that he or she can study, learn, and grow. Light leads to enlightenment. This is Solar EnLightenMent.

This is hope for Nicaragua’s future.

New Educational Ideas

kyle — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:02:15 +0000

At Bright New Ideas, we have been talking about how to increase awareness of the problem and visibility of our organization. In other words, we think that it is very important for us to not only help those in Nicaragua, but also increase awareness of the problem of lacking a sustainable, healthy, and cheap lighting source. The problem that we face is this: how do we cut through the incredible amount of information on the internet? How can we make ourselves unique?

I don’t know how many of you grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels as a kid, but we’ve been taking a lot of inspiration from them for our marketing strategy. We hope to utilize the interactivity of the internet and the explosion of user-created video content of sites like YouTube to make one of the first user-directed adventure sites to promote our cause. How will we do this? We will put polls on our website where users can vote on different possible activities (for example, exploring a community that lives without electricity) and we will document our findings and broadcast them online.

In the end, we hope to make another trip down to Nicaragua, only this time fully documenting our travels and giving you, the viewer, full access to help us plot our course and our tasks along the way. Expect the first poll to come within the next few weeks!

Also, while you’re waiting, make sure to look at Dan Buettner’s website, Blue Zones. Dan is someone else we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from. He’s been doing a lot of good work advocating for different causes around the world.

In case you don’t quite remember the concept of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, check out this website that is an internet-based version of the same idea.

Bright New Ideas President to Judge Anoka-Hennepin County Students in Technology, Engineering and Math Fair

patrick — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:15:05 +0000

Anoka-Hennepin County Schools has invited Patrick Delaney, President of Bright New Ideas to judge at the annual Students in Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Fair on January 12th, 2008. Delaney will judge students from grades 6-12 in the conference during the morning session.

The fair provides an opportunity for students to showcase their inquiry skills and creative genius in a wide variety of scientific and technological fields. This is the type of experience cannot be duplicated in the classroom and so provides great enrichment to science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs for young students, some of the core values of Bright New Ideas.

More information can be found at the Stemfair Website.