Students have a lot of pent-up energy, and being required to sit in on multiple lectures for many days a week can make one fidgety. This restlessness often manifests itself in browsing the Internet, by making repetitive movements, or a combination of both. In addition to this, students must sit down for long periods of time to study for exams or complete homework outside of their lectures, which adds to the amount of time spent sitting idly in a chair.

In this paper, we develop a small, portable machine that can serve both as an outlet for suppressed energy and as a way for students to easily remain active, all while being productive and generating electricity to charge their smartphones and computers. Because of this, we posit that our machine is particularly relevant to modern academia due to its ability to link the need for activity with the need for electricity. To achieve this, we borrow concepts from exercise bikes found in gyms and from DC generators that convert rotational kinetic energy into electrical energy. This paper will discuss the details of this pioneering work and provide some preliminary results.

Corresponding Author: Bala Maheswaran, mahes@coe.neu.edu