And That’s A Wrap!

This year's World KidWind Challenge brought 95 student teams from 21 U.S. states, Taiwan, and Mexico to Minneapolis, Minnesota from May 5th through May 8th. This year's event was hosted by ACP and co-located with the Collegiate Wind Competition. We were beyond excited to show everyone a good time in our hometown! Lots of thanks to the coaches, parents, administrators and students for all their hard work to get to Worlds and the determination and resilience they showed across the three days of competition.

Each team met this year's extra challenging competition elements with enthusiasm, determination, and out of the box thinking! This year, wind teams tested their turbine in low speed, medium speed, and high speed tunnels, with everyone trying their hand at our Yawing tunnel, which rotated their turbines (mid-test) 90 degrees! Plus, the High School Wind teams had to contend with our new Super Tunnel - or the Anderson Annihilator, as we came to call it. This brand new wind tunnel, invented and built by Dick Anderson from Wisconsin, allows us to modulate the wind speed with the twist of a knob from 0 to 10 m/s. Teams had to do two tests here, one that tested their turbine's output and a second that tested their turbine's ability to endure in super high speed winds.

For the second year, we also had 10 solar teams showcase their solar projects under our two new solar arrays - Solar Blast and Solar Arch. We hope to really grow the solar component of the KidWind Challenge next year!

As usual, each team presented their design and process to a panel of judges and participated in multiple Instant Challenges. Elementary school teams tried their hand at building a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine, while middle school teams tried to build the tallest tower they could for our crowd favorite Firefly. All teams participated in a wind turbine siting challenge, plus the high school and middle school teams did some sophisticated data analysis focused on energy efficiency. Lastly, teams participated in a Quizbowl to test their renewable energy knowledge.

In addition to all of this, teams also partied at Can Can Wonderland and attended a MN Twins Baseball game! It sure was a blast!