Nicole Mendez

Water We Doing?

Project Description

For our main spring exhibition, we decided to split into groups of four or three and take on the Siemens We Change the World Challenge, a challenge for grades K-12 requiring groups to create solutions to environmental issues facing the world, and focus on the issues surrounding water since the majority of the world is confronting water issues on a daily basis, including California with its worsening drought. The challenge consisted of seven stages: research, hypothesis, data collection, data analysis, conclusion, community awareness, and global implementation.

I was placed into a group of four along with Bridgette Bran, Jose Loera, and Oscar Alexandri. We decided to name our group Saving Bikini Bottom and the issues we focused on were water pollution and availability. As we continued to research the topic we discovered that over 3 million people die each year from water related diseases so we decided to build a portable water filter made out of easily accessible materials. Our hypothesis was: if inexpensive and accessible materials are used to make a water filter, then people with impure water supplies will be able to access clean, filtered water.

We then created the design of our water filter, built it, proceeded to test it with different types of unclean water,  and tested the quality of the water before and after being filtered. 

As a class we learned about a more detailed version of the water cycle, researched about organic and inorganic water pollutants and how they affect the environment, and wrote editorials surrounding the topic of water privatization.

Project Reflection

I feel as though I haven't learned much and have been repeating and reciting certain information, but there was one thing that came to my attention more and more as the project went on. It was the value I placed on water,  before the project began I did minimal effort to conserve water, the idea that might stop running from the sink never occurred to me unless I was in a situation that forced me to think about it, but now whenever I see someone using water for anything I start to think about what could have been done to save water and/or keep it clean and I feel that in that way I have grown. And applying to the Siemens Challenge helped me become more developed in my professional writing and it feels nice knowing that even after we finished our project there are still people out there who are just now hearing about what we've done. And it pleases me that at least they will be able to see each struggle we faced and each detail we considered with enough time to not feel overwhelmed, which is what I believed happened at Festival Del Sol. Crowds of families, friends, and teachers wanted to learn about our project but the idea of having to demonstrate an intense and stressful 3 month project in an hour and a half's time is slightly ludicrous. We tried so hard to give them as much information as possible in our time frame that they became so overwhelmed that the majority of them began to ignore many of the group panels we had put up.