Potato Battery Building Lights Up Children's Eyes

What unites children, potatoes and battery researchers? At the "Doors Open with the Mouse" event day on 3 October at MEET Battery Research Center, everything revolved around the construction of potato batteries. Under the professional guidance of MEET researchers Dr Uta Rodehorst and Dr Aleksei Kolesnikov, 32 young scientists gained insights into everyday research and experimented with the experts.

"This really works!" 6-year-old Maximilian's eyes sparkled as his homemade potato battery supplied the energy needed to make the small diode light up. In a child-friendly and pragmatic way, Dr Uta Rodehorst and Dr Aleksei Kolesnikov guided the young participants in building the potato batteries and thus gave them a concrete idea of how batteries work. In their insight into battery research at the research hotspot Münster, they also provided answers to numerous curious questions: What is electricity actually? How does lightning work? And what exactly do researchers want to improve about batteries? While the children were experimenting, Dr Adrienne Hammerschmidt, Member of the MEET Management Board, guided interested parents through the MEET laboratories, thus providing an insight into one of Germany's leading battery research centres.

Here Comes the Mouse!

Every year on German Unity Day on 3 October, curious children swarm all over Germany to discover entirely new experiential spaces instead of their usual classrooms. This year, the Mouse Door Opener Day organised by broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) invited children and parents to visit events on the theme of “Exciting Connections” and thus experience factual stories live, just like in the German well-known TV format “Sendung mit der Maus”. Almost 590 research institutes, companies and initiatives opened their doors.