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Kalundborg Production School (KPS)
Production schools are places where disadvantaged young Danes learn by doing. The school we visited near Kalundborg
(KPS) had a machine shop, a woodworking facility, an arts studio, a large greenhouse and a kitchen where participants learned cooking and catering. Participants rather than students or clients, is the term used since all the young people are expected to keep the school running. This includes producing products that can be sold on the market.
Participants had built the machine shop at the school. They had also constructed a rammed earth and solar structure for some of the participants to live in. There are lots of group activities including the one Wednesday when staff and participants formed two lines to wave Danish flags as Ed, Gail and I rode our bikes in to the grounds.
Erling Petersen, who has been arranging our visit to the Kalundborg symbiotic industrial facility arranged for our visit to the school where he serves as a director. He felt we would like to learn about the new ideas and practical inventions that were coming out of the school since many had an environmental bent. He also wanted us to speak with members of an inventors club that meets each month at the school. He thought we could share our solar bike invention.
Erling also arranged for a TV crew from Denmark's Ost2 station to come to film us and convinced a reporter and cameraman from the local newspaper to interview us. We were celebrities on the nightly news which very much impressed a little girl staying at our youth hostel.
Niels Jacobsen, the school's headmaster, treated us to lunch, a tour of the facilities and let us make telephone calls to
KUNI in Cedar Falls for our weekly report Wednesday and to the Jan Mickelson show on
WHO in Des Moines. The latter call took more than a half hour so we are greatly indebted to Niels. They will also email pictures and an article from the Danish Energy Agency about our visit the previous day.
One of the inventors was marketing a device to discover water leaks in a home. A laser attached to the water meter would signal water running. It would flash or sound when the meter moved. If no toilet had been flushed or no faucet was running and still the meter moved, there might be a leak. The device had application for the many Danes who have summer cottages. The device could be connected to the telephone and automatically dial home when water was running when it should not be.
A second pair of inventors had just built a scale model of a machine that captured energy from wave action. They had received a grant from the Danish Energy Agency for the scale model and now had another from the European Union to scale up the machine. They were interested in partners who would help them move to commercial operations.
We left KPS late in the afternoon to return to the youth hostel we had stayed the previous night since school officials had been able to find no place for us to stay in Kalundborg. That leaves us with 25 miles to ride before our first appointment there at 10 am.
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