According to this New York Times article from January 2010, a group of Harvard students decided to tackle a problem in developing nations, replacing dangerous kerosene lamps for indoor lighting with a much safer LED alternative, powered by the energy of children that love kicking soccer balls.
This eventually lead to the launch of a for-profit company (Uncharted Play) to produce these soccer balls, and a Kickstarter campaign to fund it.
With backing by the likes of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Ashton Kutcher and other celebrities and philanthropists, these soccer balls were placed in the hands of poor children in Puebla, Mexico, in 2013.
Were these impoverished children's lives changed for the better?
No.
Investigative journalists traveled to Puebla, Mexico in 2014, to talk to the children that received these soccer balls, to find out how well they were holding up and if the kids still liked and used them, a year after they were distributed. What they found out was that nearly all of these soccer balls no longer worked. Many of them stopped working within a few days to a few months after the children received them, not anywhere near the 3 years that Uncharted Play said they would last.
The cost of putting one of these stupid soccer balls into the hands of these impoverished children, was about $60 each.
Was there a better way accomplish the same goal?
Could these impoverished people been provided with a source of light, that would be more reliable and cost effective than these silly soccer balls?
Yes, and it did not require inventing something new to accomplish it.
For example, you could buy a 36 LED solar and dynamo powered camping lantern at Walmart for $15.57.
You could probably get them much cheaper if you bought them in bulk, straight from the manufacturer.
That's more LEDs and more light than the lamp that came with the novelty soccer ball.
And I am pretty sure that if you distributed these to the same kids that received the soccer balls, they would like the camping lanterns better, and after a year of use, there would be more kids still using their camping lanterns, than the soccer balls.
Even better, if you had asked the families in Puebla, Mexico if they could have spent that $60 better, they would have told you that it would have cost them less than that to be hooked up to the electrical grid, which would have provided them with much more than just light, for many years to come.
Think before you act.
If you are going to invent something to solve a problem that has the potential to change people's lives for the better, make sure it is the best possible solution to the problem, before you begin collecting funding, manufacturing, or distributing it to those that need the solution. And make sure you involve the people that need the solution, in your research. You really can't understand their needs unless you talk to them about it, first.
Because sometimes a better solution already exists and just needs the right people to get together and make it possible to get that solution into the hands of those that need it, rather than someone running off half cocked, to invent a brand new implementation of a useless novelty soccer ball.
One year, many years ago, the start of Daylight Savings Time began on April 1st. Before going to bed, my husband and I went through the house changing all the clocks. I waited for him to fall asleep and I pushed them all ahead an extra hour. He woke up that Sunday morning and rushed off to work, without ever realizing what I had done till he arrived at work and went to change the big clock on the wall. 
Now the one that got me wasn't really a prank at all. When I was back in high school, I received a phone call very early in the morning on April 1, from someone that was trying to tell me that school was canceled because of snow. Even though I was half asleep, I was quite aware of the date, and wished her a Happy April Fool's Day before I hung up. I ended up getting ready for school and going downstairs to leave, opening the front door to a vision of about 2 feet of snow. Yeah, the joke was on me, that phone call was for real.
When I was a kid, 
Budding young web designers and developers usually learn this pretty quick, when creating a page on Windows and not using the same case as the files and folders they are linking to. They often will use lowercase in all the URLs, regardless of the case of the actual file and folder names. And this will work fine when viewed on their Windows machine. But as soon as they upload it to a server that is running something else, like Linux, it stops working. Their page is full of broken images and dead links, because they used something like mypicture.jpg in place of the actual file name of MyPicture.jpg and about.html in place of the actual file name of About.html.
If the server is running Windows, case doesn't matter. The reason for this is because you can only have a single file or folder of a particular name in a folder, regardless of the case used in that file or folder name.
If the server is running Linux, case matters, as you can have multiple files and folders of the same name within a folder, each having a different case.
