Jonny Cohen is just your typical 14-year old high school freshman. Except that when he’s riding the bus to school in the morning, he’s thinking about aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and drag coefficients.
You see, a couple years ago Jonny, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, took a physics class at Northwestern University. One project centered on building little CO2 dragsters to learn about aerodynamics and wind resistance. Jonny couldn’t shake the thought of how inefficient most real vehicles on the road actually were– particularly school buses, with their broad, flat windshields. And so the idea of the Green Shield was born…
The concept is head-slappingly simple: fix a plexiglass shield of the right aerodynamic dimensions to the front of a school bus from the hood to the top of the windshield, channeling the air currents up over the bus, rather than straight into the windshield. But simple as the concept may seem, actually turning a bright idea into a useful invention is what separates wide-eyed dreamers from real world changers. Jonny’s ambition and drive are putting him on the path towards the latter.
Unable to shake the idea from his head, Jonny reached out to his sister, Azza, “and her smart friends,” who are all a couple years older, and got their help in putting the idea down on paper. This upstart team managed to secure a small seed grant from Youth Venture and traveled to Boston for a Youth Summit where they made some promising contacts with other successful entrepreneurs and inventors. One MIT professor particularly loved the idea and helped the Green Shields team design a scale wind tunnel, and still helps out as a project adviser.
Jonny also started reaching out to some local experts, emailing engineering professors and teachers at local universities. One who was excited to see his note in her inbox was Susan Benjamin, the Northwestern professor who taught the very course that planted the Green Shields seed in Jonny’s head.
With the ideas, the expert advice, and the motivation to make Green Shields a physical reality in place, there was still a need to cover some unavoidable costs for virtual simulations, fabricating prototypes, and testing. So when Jonny and his team learned of the Refresh grants, they put everything else on hold and devoted themselves entirely to a winning campaign.
Jonny is quick to spread the credit around. “My parents were sending so many emails every day to everyone they know,” he told me, adding that his sister baked cupcakes to hand out at school with info about the Pepsi Refresh Project and the Green Shields proposal. The whole school community rallied behind the idea. Teachers reminded their classes to vote every day. Posters went up all around the school and the project’s Facebook page quickly accumulated fans. At hockey games when Jonny was on the ice, cheers of “Go Green Shields” bounced through the arena. Enthusiasm spread through the community, Green Shields was featured on a local TV station, and the mayor asked Jonny to present the idea at a town meeting.
What’s next? First, Jonny is working with two new team members, Jordan Kravitz and Ben Johnston–two fellow Highland Park students who he describes as “experts in robotics and computer simulations”–to create some CAD drawings and run virtual wind simulations. After that, they plan to pick up an old school bus (”you can get them for really cheap, actualy”) and fabricate some prototypes for real-world testing at different speeds on a closed track, using some finely-tuned fuel intake monitors. “The average bus gets between 4-6 miles per gallon,” explains Jonny. “With our scale tunnel testing, we saw 10-40% improvements in fuel efficiency.” They saw bigger gains at higher speeds. “And around here there are lots of highway route buses,” he says excitedly. After that, he plans to get the Green Shield DOT approved and test them in the field under real world conditions.
“I know I’m just a kid in Chicago, and that fitting a couple buses won’t make that big of a difference,” Jonny says. “But I really think the idea could spread.” If it does, we’ll see school districts saving money on fuel costs giving some much needed relief to ever-stressed budgets, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How’s that for a win-win solution?
