Rebecca Young is 11 years old and lives in Glasgow, Scotland. In her school’s engineering club, she was asked to think of something that would solve a social problem, and she did not have to look far: every winter she saw people sleeping outdoors, with nothing to protect them from the cold.
That is how her idea was born: a blanket that folds into a backpack and has solar panels that charge a battery during the day to release heat at night. With that invention, she won a national competition with more than 70 thousand participants, and the company Thales decided to turn her design into real prototypes.
Today, those blankets are already keeping homeless people warm on the streets of Glasgow. And Time magazine included her among the world’s ten “Girls of the Year”. At age 11, Rebecca did not wait to grow up to change something — she simply looked around and decided to act.
