Building a windmill in Africa, MacGyver style

I just watched last Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Show, and want to highly recommend the show’s interview segment (it’s 7 minutes long and is the third segment of the show). Jon Stewart’s guest was William Kamkwamba, author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, who Stewart introduced as

“an inventor from Malawi, who at the age of 14 took a bicycle frame, a tractor fan, and a drawing in a library book and built his family an electricity-generating windmill.”

Kamkwamba’s parents did not have enough money to send him to school due to the famine in Malawi, so at age 14 he spent time in the U.S.-funded local library analyzing technical diagrams from books on electromagnetics (they were written in English, which he knew little of, so the diagrams were his primary method for learning) and then decided to build a windmill that could generate electricity for his family’s home.

Aside from being a feel-good story, it raises a question: What can parents and educators do to inspire this kind of ingenuity in American teenagers? We obviously have many examples of teens around the country who display William’s intellectual curiousity and work ethic, but there are too many examples of those who do not. Please share your thoughts in the “Comments” section below!