NuVu went deep into Off the Grid Systems during Winter Session 1, looking at ideas around both the environmental and ethical aspect of grids—and the various groups and individuals who are inspired to withdraw from them.

“Off the Grid was actually proposed last year and I really wanted to teach this class because I'm a communication media person,” shares NuVu Media Maven Heide Solbrig. Starting out by examining what alternative forms of communication exist, the studio took a deep dive into topics such as: What are the grids that we use? Transportation? Power? Communication? Can we build prototypes for a few of the more accessible ‘off-the-grid’ technologies, including model wind-turbines?  What would an ‘off-the-grid’ internet look like? Can we make decisions about when and where we participate in mainstream grid systems or just go our own way?

“Ultimately grids are ways that we organize society, so we started by thinking why people would want to be off grid. Then we moved into the social structures around grids, to text systems to math and science—it was such a great combination for understanding how technology really works more than simply just what a grid is,” says Heide.

“In the beginning,” says 10th grader Bridget Kraemer. “It was the conversation around what a grid actually is that I found interesting. The more we learned, the harder it was to define just what a grid was.”

One group within the studio explored a decentralized social media network, what they called a Commuter Communication. This open sourced project allowed the user to own their own LoRa radio based hardware and software, freeing them from the influence of for profit companies. The spread of information was transmitted as students left the “mother ship” of NuVu, and ventured home, spreading and strengthening the signal outside of Cambridge, through hand held devices the students carried with them.

“We live in a world that has a very set standard for how we communicate, which is the expectation of instant global transmission, with speed and data transfer rate being the priorities,” says Jade Vincent, now in her junior year at NuVu. “Our group thought it would be cool to experiment with user controlled items that have constraints. You won’t be able to get stuff instantly, but we were trying to build a weird community just for us,” she explains.

Coach Heide says that it always came down to trust within the group, and the trust that they had with each other. “That's so crucial. The basic idea of trusting each other, and the assumption that there are no bad actors here. This is something that they can't do in their normal life— just communicate between each other—because there's a big old corporation being like, ‘oh, how do we sell this?’ So if they're building the tech, writing the software and making the content, then they can trust it.”

Other projects that came from the Off the Grid studio were a wind turbine combined with a flywheel power bank, with the aim to provide supplemental power to NuVu; and looking at fire safety in an off the grid studio.

Coach Heide says that watching the students dive into this subject felt like important work. “I think that the studio not only expanded upon math and science skills, but it also gave kids agency over things like social media in a world that feels kind of hostile right now,” she shares. “Plus it gave them a sense of both the technical and academic knowledge that is needed to explore such a subject, as well as the sense of community that kids are so desperate for right now.”