STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: JANS

Another week, another opportunity to catch up with our STEM-In-Action teams to see how they're saving the world one mission at a time! If you're just tuning into the eCYBER Blog - WELCOME! The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) STEM-In-Action Grant awards eCYBERMISSION teams up to $5,000 to develop their projects into mature and scalable solutions in their community. Typically, we award this honorary grant to five teams, but in 2020 ten lucky teams took home the prestigious award. Back in the Fall, we caught up with each of our ten SIAG team and this Spring we've been getting the scoop on all their progress. Today, we're catching up with 6th grade team from the Washington, D.C. area: Team JANS!

--

It’s been a few months since our last update so we’ve got a lot to share with you! To give you a quick refresher, we have been working on a modular water filter that is cheap and eco friendly to combat the drinking water pollution crisis. 790 million people don’t have access to clean drinking water. That's 11% of the world's population!!! We want to make clean water available to everyone.

Since we got the grant we purchased a 3D printer, improved the canister design, and printed more canisters. We increased the size of our canister and we also created a video demonstrating our canister’s capabilities. The video includes time-lapse of the printing of the canister, experiments with some of the filter materials, a demonstration of the canister’s durability and more! You can view the video here. Each of our team members experimented with 1 cup of pesticides and 1 cup of water, then used either cabbage, cilantro, fruit peels, or moringa to filter it.

We created an ultra-fine mesh, a triple ring design to improve the stacking mechanism, and increased the size of our canisters. This increased our filtering volume, improved the canister’s filtering efficiency, and the user-friendliness overall.

Figuring out how to use the printer, as well as calibrate the canister and lid to a perfect dimension were a big learning curve and we had many challenges to face. The support filament which supports the 3D printed model kept getting jammed in the printer. We had to make multiple trips to our local 3D printing store to get it fixed. They gave us a special cleaning filament to fix it and we haven’t had problems since. 

One of our challenges was to spread the word about our project and get responses during COVID time. We were planning to showcase our canister at STEM events but due to COVID most of them got cancelled. We created a website to better showcase our product here.

We were aiming to distribute at least 45 canisters to our community. This turned out to be a challenge due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we’re still persevering and trying to distribute our canisters, as well as increase awareness of the water crisis. As a matter of fact, we have reached out to our county’s library branch and local children museums to see if we could give a talk about our project.

We are continuing to think about ways to enhance the features of the canister. For example, a canister that can automatically read the water quality after you finished filtering the water. 

Our team is most excited to distribute more canisters to people in need and to outreach to charities and organizations that we could contact to bring our canisters to people around the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water. We want to spread the word about our project as much as possible. We are really excited to continue work on our project. This is Team JANS signing out.

-

Team JANS is doing the extraordinary and making clean water accessible and affordable to people as well as eco-friendly. Either option would have an incredible and global-scale ripple effect, but pairing both together we know will make this team destined for something big. We cannot wait to follow along and watch all they accomplish in helping both their local community as well as communities suffering from water shortages and pollution worldwide.

-Mission Control

Colleen Minan
AEOP Communications & Marketing Specialist
cminan@nsta.org