STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Algaegators

Our STEM-In-Action Grant winning teams have been hard at work for the past year advancing their eCYBERMISSION projects to make a difference in their communities. If you're new to the eCYBERMISSION blog, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) awards STEM-In-Action Grants of up to $5,000 to eCYBERMISSION teams that wish to further develop and implement their projects in their communities. Typically, only five teams receive a STEM-In-Action grant, but this year ten teams took home the award. To kick us off, we're checking in with Washington locals, team Algaegators!

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The Algaegator is a mobile algae filtering system used to clean lakes afflicted with toxic blue green cyanobacteria. We have been building a second fully functioning model using our grant money. This will allow us to hopefully implement our solution in the future. With the grant money, we have made a brand new floating platform and subframe, implemented a SUP motor for propulsion, coded Raspberry Pis and added a rudder support. We have worked on coding a servo motor using Python implemented on a Raspberry Pi. We have designed a rigid structure that can support an entire rudder which we control with our Pis. This structure is composed of clear acrylic, screws, washers, an all-thread, and some 3d printed plastic parts as well as a push rod. In doing so we were able to remotely hook up through Bluetooth a phone in order to control our Pi.

We have plans to get on the lake to fine tune our controls with the device and decide how much still needs to be changed. We also plan to fully automate our device and get data on the steerability and motor controllability. We are going to research the hazards of the lake, how they will affect our device and how our device will work in those hazardous areas. We plan to make our device manufacturable. We plan to make a program that would allow the device to move around the lake.

Through our experimentation we learned several aspects that we needed to change in our prototype and in our general knowledge of the topic. Here are a few. We learned our filters were not the correct size which essentially stopped us in our tracks. We learned we would probably need an 80 micron filter. In order to use our new filter, we needed to learn how to sew in order to attach them to our outer frame. We fried one Pi in our trials because we connected too powerful of a battery to it while trying to power a larger servo. When we first tested the propulsion engine on the lake, the motor did not work because it fell clean off of our flotation board. We needed to swap into a mechanical dual screw connection method.

As we continued to improve our design, people had started to learn about our project. We were interviewed for a newspaper article, published May 27, 2021 in the Camas-Washougal Post Recorder.

Our Camas School District highlighted our work in their Facebook post on June 1, 2021:

“Teens tackle toxic algae!  Camas School District middle-schoolers Rafa Lavagnino, 13, and Tenzin Kelsang, 13, test their mobile, algae-filtering "Algaegator" invention at Camas' Lacamas Lake in the spring of 2021. The seventh-graders' work recently earned them a spot in a national STEM competition sponsored by the United States Army and the National Science Teaching Association, as well as a $5,000 grant to improve the toxic-algae filtration device.”

We presented our Nationals presentation to the Camas City Council and anyone from the community who wanted to attend. The Council then presented us with a Certificate of Appreciation.

Our work was highlighted by the Lacamas Watershed community group on their Watershed website. This group is composed of citizen scientists that measure algae levels on our local lakes.

In January, we presented to the entire 7th grade at Odyssey Middle School (about 100 kids) during science to educate them about this particular algae issue and our solution. The students are studying pollution in waterways and researching solutions that could help.

The biggest challenge recently was creating the presentation for the entire 7th grade with limited time. We revamped our Nationals presentation, adding in new findings and work. We also changed the order in which we presented slides which meant we had to practice parts which we were unfamiliar with. We made it through, however it definitely was challenging mentally and physically. 

We are excited to run the device on the lake and further develop the prototype by making it autonomous and ready to be manufactured. Ideally, we would make it a marketable product as an open source design so people could use it to create their own system depending on their current lake conditions. We want it to be a fully or semi autonomous system that would be used to filter algae with only the need for an image of the body of water to begin navigation. We would also sell completed models (no need to build (ready to run)) which could be purchased for a price or possibly be rented. 

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We're so impressed by Rafa and Tenzin's problem-solving attitude and drive to continuously improve their project. We especially love their community advocacy, sharing their invention to other citizen scientists and encouraging other seventh-grade students to get involved. Congratulations, team, we can't wait to see the awesome things you continue to accomplish!

Faith Benner
AEOP Senior Communications and Marketing Specialist