SBCC Student Leaders in Science: Bead Roller

Hello and welcome to the Rwandan Bead roller page. The first project that we had was brought to us by Dick Lamb, “founder” of the Balance Bar, who does charity work in Rwanda Africa. Genocide survivors, mainly women and children, cut paper into elongated triangles and then roll them up into beads which they then dip in lacquer to make them sturdy and shiny. He saw that rolling the beads up by hand takes close to 5 minutes per bead and came to us with challenge of making a simple machine that would assist them in doing this. He promised he would take us to Rwanda with him to show the locals how to use the machine if we produced one. Before the meeting was over Spencer Wass had sketched up a few ideas and told everyone that they should get together at his house and pound out some prototypes. It turned out to be a great experience for everyone because it gave them the opportunity to get some hands on experience. This made it all the more interesting and over the next few weeks we came up with about 5 working prototypes. Unfortunately when we presented our working prototypes we were told that we would not be taken to Rwanda and that we could not ship anything there but that we could send plans, so the locals could attempt to make their own.

Participating Members: