Most teenagers spend their free time staring at screens or hanging out at malls. Back in 2013, a fifteen-year-old girl in Canada spent hers building electronics out of garbage and a hot glue gun.
That teenager was Ann Makosinski. When a friend in the Philippines mentioned she couldn't study at night because her family couldn't afford electricity, Makosinski didn't just feel sorry for her. She built a working flashlight powered entirely by human body heat. No batteries. No traditional grid. Just science meeting a real-world problem.
Fast forward to today, and Makosinski is shifting her focus from personal gadgets to early childhood education. She is building colourful toys designed to teach kids how renewable energy works from an early age.
The Science That Powered a Global Sensation
You have probably heard about the Hollow Flashlight. It launched Makosinski into international fame, landing her awards at the Google Science Fair and Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, plus a spot on Jimmy Fallon's couch.
How did it actually work? It used Peltier tiles—thermoelectric generators that produce an electric current when there is a temperature difference between two sides. One side touched the user's warm palm, while the other side was cooled by ambient air flowing through the hollow plastic tube.
It was brilliantly simple. Yet, most adults told kids that invention required millions of dollars and massive laboratory spaces. Makosinski proved that anyone with curiosity could hack together a working prototype using scraps and basic physics principles.
She didn't stop at flashlights. By eighteen, while studying at the University of British Columbia, she designed the eDrink. This clever coffee mug captured excess heat from a hot beverage and converted it into a small electrical charge capable of boosting a dying smartphone battery for thirty minutes.
Why Teaching Kids About Clean Energy Matters Now
Children learn by touching, breaking, and building. Handing a child a smartphone and telling them apps are magic doesn't build problem-solvers.
Makosinski's new line of colourful toys changes that dynamic. Instead of passive entertainment, these toys spin, light up, or generate sound only when powered by kinetic movement, miniature water wheels, or sunlight.
Kids get instant visual feedback. They see that energy doesn't just appear from a wall socket; it has to come from somewhere. When a child has to wind a mechanism or position a toy under a desk lamp to make it function, they grasp the mechanics of sustainability before they even hit middle school.
Most school curriculums treat renewable energy as a dry textbook chapter. Diagrams of solar panels and wind turbines on flat paper rarely spark genuine inspiration. Physical toys turn abstract green energy concepts into tangible play.
What Inventing Actually Takes
If you look at Makosinski's background, her success wasn't born out of an elite private school incubator. She grew up listening to opera, playing the piano, and receiving a box of transistors instead of standard commercial toys.
That lack of commercial toys forced her to improvise. She spent hours gluing random household items together. Most of those early projects failed miserably.
That is the part of the inventor's journey that glossy magazine profiles tend to skip. People see the awards and the talk show appearances, ignoring the hundreds of hours of failed soldering and burnt fingers.
If you want to encourage young creators in your life, stop buying them things that do all the thinking for them. Give them room to mess up. Leave broken appliances around the garage. Let them use a hot glue gun under supervision.
Makosinski's pivot to children's toys is a deliberate attempt to scale that exact mindset. She wants the next generation of girls and boys to realize they don't need to wait for permission or corporate funding to fix local problems.
Build your own tools. Question standard assumptions. Start small with whatever resources sit right in front of you.
