And Ben Markham said, Let there be playground equipment; and there was light.

It works like this: A small generator normally used with wind turbines is placed in the body of the merry-go-round, and when turned by students the power is stored for later use. But the generator needs 300 revolutions per minute, at which speed the kids would be flung like rocks out of a slingshot.

So gear boxes were installed to bring the requirement down to 12 revolutions per minute. The power is funneled to car batteries which then are connected to chargers for LED lamps that can run for 50 hours before needing another jolt. To get a feel for the need, understand that there are thousands of schools off the power grid and that only 25 percent of all Africans have access to electricity.

"A typical Ghanaian kid has never seen an on/off switch," said Markham, who graduated from BYU decades ago and spent 33 years as a chemical engineer. While in Ghana for the LDS Church he saw kids playing in dirt fields and dark schools. The power-generating playground equipment idea came to him as a solution to both problems and he brought in some friends at BYU for advice.

The result is the senior project of students like Eliza Padilla and Ben Packer who recently went to Essam, Ghana, to install the latest iteration of the merry-go-round. The major hurdle, they said, was using only what was available in the country to construct the machine.

Markham wants his idea to boost the local economy.

"I don't want to build these in China and export them to Ghana," he said.

As a result, supplies and tools were in high demand. For example, said Padilla, when the students needed a 2-foot by 2-foot piece of steel, the only way to get it done was by a Ghanaian who had a hammer and chisel.

"It took all day, but he did it," she said.

Hard labor, scarce resources and even disease made the short deadline for completion a tough one to meet.

"Everything was smashed into two weeks," said Packer, who contracted malaria and was out of commission for three days. "There was a lot of tension sometimes."

Using recycled steel, including parts from old Land Rovers, the job was complete and two previous prototypes show that expectations should be exceeded. The merry-go-rounds were initially built to handle 20 kids at a time but nearly 40 pile on. Markham and others also figured the machines would be played on for about six hours a day, but the real number is close to 12 hours.

The merry-go-round is just the first piece of power-generating playground equipment that BYU and Markham have in mind. A swingset is in the works as is a rope pull that you run up a hill then ride back down.

But Ghana is such a poor country that funding is entirely through donors in the United States. (The GDP of Ghana, which has 22 million people, is similar to that of Utah, with just 2.6 million people.) At $7,000 per playground set, even just a few can get expensive. There are five systems in the works, but Markham would like to see 100 a year built. For more information, visit www.empowerplaygrounds.org.