What if you could harness your children's energy to power your house?

Well that's just plain cool.

Soccket started out as a class project designed by four Harvard undergrads in 2008. When they first came up with the idea, local engineers and professors told them it would be impossible to make something equally lightweight, durable, functional, and mechanical, but the students barreled ahead, running their initial tests with a hamster ball. Eventually they settled on a system that uses a sliding magnetic slug. The magnet shunts back and forth inside a stabilized inductive coil within the ball, storing generated power in a capacitor. And so, these students created light—three hours of LED light for a quarter hour’s play, to be exact. After a little jiggering, they developed a fully kickable prototype, just a tad heavier than a FIFA regulation soccer ball, and brought it for testing at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. In 2011, realizing the potential of their product, the friends founded Uncharted Play to develop and distribute the Soccket and other products.

German television personality Jan Hahn and model Barbara Meier with the soccket