Yohance Whyte working on a circuit during a recent after school session. His group is developing an ultra-efficient sprinkler for the Water Fair.
With our second annual Water Fair just a few weeks away, our after school students and their peers from the Eagle Academy are busy developing this year’s projects.
Our STEM teachers — Veeshan Narinesingh, Herbert Brown, Charlie Cohen, Omar James Mendoza, Karina Buhler and Oscar Flores — are guiding these student projects along with Nancy Degnan from Columbia University, Andrew Peterson from the Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem, and Junte Lin and Prelas Toyo from the Eagle Academy for Young Men of Queens.
With a focus on water conservation, health, and the environment, this year’s fair promises to be informative, inspirational and entertaining. Here’s a rundown of the projects our young men are working on:
- Comparative Analysis of Conventional and Vertical Garden in the Urban Setting: Students will construct a tower garden and a conventional indoor garden, monitoring the efficiency of both models for water use and conservation.
- Taking a Prototype to Market: Students are using Arduino to create an ultra-efficient sprinkler designed to make conventional sprinklers obsolete.
- Cholera Epidemics — The Water/Bacteria Dynamic: Students will cultivate and treat their own populations of bacteria to better understand how bacteria grow and pass on drug-resistance.
- Water/Energy Nexus: Students will research hydraulic fracturing from an earth science, socioeconomic and environmental perspective.
- Aquatic Garbage Collector: Students will use an engineering approach to find solutions to the global problem of ocean trash.
- Water Filtration and Access to Clean Water: A Study of osmosis and reverse osmosis and its applications. Students will learn about the processes of removing contaminants from water as well as the role of desalination for water-stressed regions in the United States, the Middle East and Africa.
- Water and Climate Change: How global warming impacts water. Students will analyze data on natural processes like the water cycle, sea level rise, precipitation, and drought and floods and interpret multi-year trends through computer software and graphical visualizations.
The Water Fair is scheduled for Saturday, March 24, from 11am-2pm at MIST Harlem. You can get your (free) ticket here, and find out more about the fair here.
Below are some photos by Omar James Mendoza of our students hard at work on their Water Fair projects.
