(July 9) - Florida prep school students are putting their science and technology education to use and may help save lives in the process.
Since last September, a team of 13 students at Gulliver Prep has been working on a project to help provide clean drinking water to victims in storm-wrecked Haiti. Their research and ingenuity has produced a solar-powered filtration system that recycles rainfall, reported The Miami Herald.
Biomedical students spent a month studying how to kill bacteria similar to that found in the island's water.
''The UV light was one of the most effective things we tried,'' Nikita Mayani, 15, a biomedical sciences student, told the Miami Herald.
The students gave their data to the prep school's engineering program, which designed and built a device that utilizes ultraviolet light to fight bacteria.
The engineering students decided that the instrument should be fueled by the sun due to Haiti's frequent power outages, They gave it wheels for easy transport.
The $5,000 price tag for creating the module was footed by a grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has a long-standing partnership with Gulliver Prep.
''It's a pretty solid design,'' Julian Costa, 17, told the Miami Herald. "It collects rainwater, the water goes through the UV filters and then you have drinkable water.''
The students plan to build another prototype in August and will send the better of the two models to a hospital in Haiti.
For more on this story, check out The Miami Herald.
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