I "wondered" while Kite Flying this weekend

You can do a lot by wondering.

If you've been reading my blog for awhile now, you are familiar with my perspective that wondering is a valued experience and one in which we don't encourage enough of in our society.

This past weekend, I enjoyed great times and great wind by flying kites with my extended family.  I haven't done that in a while and it took me back to one of my Serious Play experiences in my childhood.  In elementary school, one of the best teachers I've ever had tasked us with designing and building our own kite for Kite Day.  Some of the kids dreaded the activity, but I enjoyed the month-long anticipation of how my kite--and the kites of my allies and friends--would fly that day.  What made the day even more interesting was how our kites would fare when coupled with the most important--and least controllable--variable: wind.

The date of Kite Day was calendered by the teachers earlier in the semester.  When Kite Day came around, you had whatever weather was given you.  Thus, if the winds were calm that day, that's what you had to work with to get your kite up and flying.  The real value, however, was not so much in who won the contest, but in the inquiry and invention that I saw among my classmates.  So much variety and texture was present that day.  Ah, the good 'ol days.

So, it was in this kite-flying context yesterday that I had a bit of an epiphany.  You see, the kite was really pulling my arm as it flung here and there across the sky.  [Aside: did I mention that the kite was a fairy kite?]  With every pull on my arm, I thought back to a recent conversation that I had with an entrepreneurially-minded student wherein we discussed the power of the wind.  I know the interest in wind power is increasing, so I shouldn't be surprised that my wondering led to this, but it did.  I wondered if my arm--acting as a piston--, could be replicated in such a way that the kite could be used to turn an electrical generation device of some sort.  I could tell that even the Fairy Kite had the ability to generate quite a bit of power even with 10 MPH winds.

Coincidentally this morning, my TED RSS feed fed me this video of Saul Griffith debriefing the audience on the history of the kite and the future use of kites to generate sustainable electricity:  

I love it when my wondering is legitimized in someone else's expertise.