05 Feb

SIM City: Philly Students Debut Sewer Inlet Monitor at STEM Competition

MBACS_2016

Move over, Ninja Turtles—there’s a new hard-shelled, talkative superhero in the city sewer system. Meet SIM (Sewer Inlet Monitor), defender of our rivers and streams, guardian against street flooding, and unrepentant tattletale. SIM texts or emails when sewer inlets become clogged with trash, alerting the public when cleaning is needed.

Yesterday, five 10th-grade students from Mariana Bracetti Academy Charter School presented SIM at the regional portion of the 2016 Governor’s STEM Competition. At the School District of Philadelphia, judges from the Mayor’s Office of Education and Drexel University awarded the students first prize; they will advance to the statewide competition in May to represent Philadelphia. (Full disclosure: They faced no competition from other teams. Full disclosure, Part II: These students worked after school, they came into school on days off, they worked after full days of standardized testing, so … they won and they earned it.)

MBACS_SIM

The photo above shows SIM on the outside; it’s camouflaged, waterproof, and rugged enough for, well, a sewer inlet. The device’s inner workings are, for now, a trade secret. (We’ll open-source the project shortly after the state competition.) The Mariana Bracetti students worked with Philadelphia Water‘s greenSTEM project to research a community problem (excessive trash near the school, right across the street from Frankford Creek), learn basic coding and circuit-building, develop a prototype, test, and revise the final product.

In addition to presenting SIM to the judges and conducting a succesful live demo, the students were issued a Project in a Box challenge: given 30 minutes and a mystery box of materials, they had to work as a team to solve a problem. The challenge? Build a paper airplane to fly a raw egg into the center of a target, using a short list of materials (tape, tissue paper, glue, etc.). Here’s how it went:

MBACS_eggplane

Submit your egg jokes/puns in the comments section.

Thanks to the School District and the judges, as well as Mariana Bracetti teacher Lauren DeHart and Drexel/greenSTEM coding mentor Sean Force.

12 Jun

Fourth Installation: SLA Beeber

eyeball_group_web

Students at Science Leadership Academy’s Beeber campus installed Root Kit #4 yesterday, capping off an 8-week minicourse of designing and building the sensor housing, soldering the kit’s circuit board, testing radio signal strength, and troubleshooting along the way. Remember the waterlogged sensors from a few posts ago? We did an immersion test and found out water was leaking into the Pelican case at the base of the cable glands:

immersion_test

We used a combination of Rust-oleum Leak Seal spray (not that effective, smells toxic) and silicone caulk (it works, but it’s messy-looking) to waterproof the case. After connecting to the school’s network and testing signal strength from the flowerbed to the 3rd floor office, students buried the soil sensors:

SLA_install_dig

The students went with the eyeball housing for their site, and designated the rocketship design for a future installation at the Franklin Institute this summer (details to come). We poked a pinhole into the eye’s center to allow the antenna to peek out:

SLA_eyeball_garden

Thank you to all the SLA students, Mr. Sokoloff, Darya Drahun and Sandy Sorlien—mission accomplished!

03 Jun

Waterlogged

waterlogged_RootKit1

Mysteriously, the sensors at Nebinger and Cook-Wissahickon elementary schools stopped transmitting data late last week. A trip out to each school’s garden quickly revealed the problem: waterlogged Root Kits, with circuit boards and battery cases floating in water. Weren’t these things supposed to be waterproofed? Not against last week’s heavy rain, apparently. We have a hunch as to where the water is getting in; students at SLA Beeber will conduct an immersion test (i.e., put the case in a bucket of water) to see where the water is leaking in and recommend fixes. But for now, the Root Kits are sidelined and drying out, and we’ll test the circuit boards to see if they still work. Check out the futility of the dessicant pack in the photo below:waterlogged_RootKit2