12-Year-Old Inventor, Rebecca Young, Recognized by Time Magazine

Rebecca Young, from Glasgow, the United Kingdom, is currently 13 years old, and got the idea of a solar-powered backpack with an electric blanket. She was selected for the 2025 Girls of the Year list in Time magazine on Thursday, August 14, 2025. Rebecca was worried about homeless people sleeping on the streets in winter, so she created the backpack to keep them warm when it is cold.

As Rebecca says, “Seeing all the homeless people, it made me want to help — it’s a problem that should be fixed.” She also said, “It helped me see a different aspect of engineering, and how it could actually help people. That definitely helped inspire me.”

When explaining how the backpack works, Rebecca said, “During the day, the heat from the sun can energize the solar panels, and they go into a battery pack that can store the heat. When it’s cold at night, people can use the energy stored in the battery pack to sleep on.” “In Glasgow, it can be freezing at night, and they [homeless people] will have no power, so I thought the solar panel could heat it,” she explains. During mid-winter, temperatures in Glasgow can go as low as 17 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rebecca got the idea during an engineering club at her school, Kelvinside Academy. She won first place in the UK Primary Engineer contest, where 70,000 students devised social problem solutions.

Then, an engineering company constructed the design, with thirty of the blankets donated to a homeless shelter in Glasgow and a goal to make 120 more.

The ten winners of the Girls of the Year, from all over the world, are shown on a digital cover of Time magazine, where they are styled as Lego minifigures, which Rebecca said was both “really cool and crazy,” and it is part of the privilege.

As the first Girls of the Year list, it honors “10 extraordinary young leaders” from ages 12 to 17. The list includes Zoé Clauzure, a 15-year-old French singer who won the 2023 Junior Eurovision Song Contest with an anti-bullying song, and Coco Yoshizawa, a 15-year-old Japanese skateboarder who won a gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

SOURCES:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cn02gz9nlw0o

https://time.com/collections/girls-of-the-year-2025/7301993/rebecca-young/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wyv1r0yjeo