2024 World KidWind Challenge

Highlights from the 2024 KidWind World Championship: A Summit Showdown of Student Creativity and Wind Power!

This year's KidWind World Championship was held May 5–8 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, drawing 95 student teams from 21 U.S. states, Taiwan, and Mexico. The event was hosted alongside the American clean energy trade show and ran concurrently with the Collegiate Wind Competition. We were thrilled to put on such a spectacular event in Minnesota! Enormous thanks to the coaches, parents, administrators, and students whose hard work made it possible to compete at this world championship, and who showed such determination and resilience across three days of competition.

Every team met this year's extra-challenging events with passion, determination, and innovative thinking! This year, wind teams tested their turbines in low-, medium-, and high-speed wind tunnels, and tried out our rotating wind tunnel, which turns the turbine 90 degrees midway through the test! In addition, high school wind teams had to contend with our new wind tunnel — a super tunnel we call the Anderson Annihilator. This brand-new tunnel, invented and built by Mr. Dick Anderson of Wisconsin, can dial wind speeds anywhere from 0 to 10 m/s. Teams ran two tests in it: one measuring their turbine's output, and another testing the turbine's durability in ultra-high winds.

As always, every team presented their design and process to a panel of judges and took part in several instant challenges. Elementary teams tried building vertical-axis wind turbines, while middle school teams attempted to build the tallest tower they could using our popular Firefly kit. All teams took part in a wind turbine siting challenge, and high school and middle school teams also tackled advanced data analysis focused on energy efficiency. Finally, teams competed in a quiz testing their knowledge of renewable energy.