These Soccer Balls and Jump Ropes Can Generate Power

Uncharted Play, a New York City-based startup, enables children in developing countries to build reserves of energy through play.

While visiting her cousins in Nigeria, Jessica Matthews noticed that the electricity would go out multiple times a day. While a diesel generator provided spotty support, it also spewed strong fumes.

“They couldn’t imagine a world where this wouldn’t be an issue,” she says. “They were in a hopeless situation, where daily life was continuously impacted.”

A few years later, in 2008, Matthews, then a junior at Harvard, was asked to invent a new product in a course called “Enginnering Sciences 20: How to Create Things & Have Them Matter.”

The device had to help address a key challenge in developing countries. Like Matthews, her teammates, Julia Silverman, Jessica Lin and Hemali Thakkar, had visited or worked in places where there are major gaps in energy resources.

For the assignment, the four students invented Soccket, a soccer ball that supplies electrical energy. A pendulum within the ball captures the kinetic energy generated as it moves around, driving a motor and charging a Lithium ion battery inside. After one hour of play, one ball is able to power an LED lamp for three hours. (Soccket plugs directly into a lamp, also designed by the students.) Fully charged, the ball can fuel the same LED light for 72 hours.

Matthews and her teammates began by experimenting with everyday items. To test the logic behind Soccket, they taped a shake-to-charge flashlight inside a hamster ball. By rolling the rough contraption back and forth, they proved the concept could ultimately work.

The next prototype featured that same flashlight embedded inside a Nike soccer ball. They tested the soccer ball in the field with users and received feedback. The product needed to be light yet durable enough to withstand significant force, so that the delicate guts of the ball wouldn’t get damaged.