Many refugee camps for Syrian refugees are located in the middle of the desert in Jordan and Lebanon. The larges of these is the Zaatari refugee camp, located in Jordan just over the Syrian border, which houses around 100,000 refugees from Syria. On this camp and others like it, fresh food is scarce and farming and gardening is nearly impossible due to the harsh, arid climate. In addition, there is a lack of shade from the sun in such camps.

We created a planter that allows refugees to grow fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs while also providing them with shade and a potential community gathering space. At full scale, the planter stands about seven feet tall, allowing people to stand or sit under it and use it for shade. It also swivels down to closer to ground level to allow people to tend to the plants in the planter. Eventually, the planter will have a tarp over it that will allow certain amounts of sunlight in while still trapping moisture in the planter. This will allow users of the planter to minimize water consumption, as water is often hard to find in refugee camps, particularly ones in the desert such as Zaatari.

Our first iteration was actually a radically different idea which involved a symbiotic relationship between plants and fish, which would live in a tank below the actual planter. The fish would feed off the nutrients created by the plants, while the 

Our group wanted to address the problem that many kids in refugee camps are bored frequently, and don't  have fun things to do. As well as making something that would entertain the kids for a while, we wanted to provide electricity, another basic need for refugees.  We decided that we wanted to make a play to power machine that would generate electricity as the kids played on it. Not only would this solve both of our problems that we were trying to adress, but would empower the kids in the sense that just by playing they are helping people around them. Since we planned on solving two basic problems with one solution, this project was classified as fixing a beyond-basic need.

We ran into a few problems in the beginning, mostly revolving around originality. We found out that there was already many play to power machines that existed. Some of them were ideas that we had brainstormed before. We discovered swing sets that generated electricity, see saw's, and others like that.  We decided that it would be best if we made our own playground toy, and found a way to have it generate power. 

We ended up making two mini see saw's that you stand on that powers electricity. 

There is a generator inside one of the boxes, that spins as the kids are balancing from left to right. There is also a ratchet that is connected to the rod, that causes the generator to spin.