GERING, Neb. (AP) - A physics class doesn’t normally cultivate bacteria as part of a project, but when you’re on Brett Moser’s Samsung Solve for Tomorrow team, anything is possible.
His group of 12 students has been working on building sanitization boxes for PPE masks using UVC light for the past semester. Not only does it take quite a bit of engineering and involve plenty of physics, it also requires the students to test if it really works, and for that, they needed to cultivate bacteria to test it on.
“We went through a lot of testing with petri dishes and collecting swabs to see if it would kill them and all that. And so we did a lot of testing with that for (about) a month,” senior Emme Parker said. “…We had to work with bacteria because you can’t really culture a live virus. So, just seeing how it all translated over and making those connections was cool.”
The students broke up into three different groups representing the core STEM subjects, each getting to choose which they thought was most interesting or most suited their abilities. Parker was part of the science and math group.
Senior Trent Davis chose the engineering group, since that’s the path he hopes to pursue after high school.
“I’m planning to study chemical engineering,” he told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.
The third group was the technology group, who was in charge of a lot of the programming for the project and filming the entire process to submit as an entry for the national Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest.
The 12-student team made it to the semifinal round in this year’s contest, finishing in the top 75 schools and winning $15,000 in technology and classroom resources for GHS for the fifth time in a row. They found out recently that they did not make it to the next round, where judges narrow it down to the top 10 in the nation. GHS had reached top 10 in 2016-17 and 2017-18 and took home the national prize awarded to only 3 schools in the 2016-17 competition.
Despite this year’s tough blow, the students are continuing to advance their projects, not for the competition, but for the community.
They’ve already built a small sanitization box that can sanitize a mask with UVC light. The plan is to build three more large boxes that can each hold two masks and sanitize them in 30 minutes, one of which will be donated to the fire department.
“We figured that partnering with the community and the Samsung project, kind of killing two birds with one stone, would be a really good way to spend our money and use our time,” Davis said.
The idea for the project actually came from talking with the fire department and their need for PPE that fit exactly right. Because of that need, it was easier for them to reuse PPE that has already passed a fit test than to constantly put new PPE through the fit test. Thus, the department needed a way to sanitize its reusable masks.
“You can’t use any sprays because that would ruin the integrity of the mask,” Parker said.
After doing research, the students discovered that UVC light at a certain level can kill viruses and bacteria, making it the perfect way to sanitize the PPE.
The students problem-solved through different experiments, including figuring out what wavelength of UVC light was killing germs and how to protect skin and eyes from the harmful rays of light.
“Mr. Moser kind of gave us free rein, so we got to design our own experiments, and I really liked that aspect,” senior Anna Ossian said. “In school you’re always told what you need to do and the steps and stuff, but we got to make that up as we went along and saw what worked and what didn’t.”
Davis said he’s been proud of the work he and his classmates have done so far.
“I like the fact that we could build something all the way from the ground up,” he said. “We had to prove the right wavelength and the right exposure time to kill the viruses that we were looking at and kill the bacteria that we were looking at. So, starting from scratch and then working hands-on to get a finished product that’s effective at what it does and holds up to what it advertises as was my favorite part of the project.”
Moser said that one of the big boxes will be donated to the fire department, and the other two might go up for sale to replenish some of the funds used for this year’s project. He said he hopes to have the project done by the end of the school year.
Despite the project not advancing to the next stage in the competition, Ossian said that getting the boxes out to the community was really the main goal of the entire project.
“I think we were all hoping to make it to the next step, but I think, especially with this project right now, I think the most important part was just getting the boxes to our community,” she said. “I think that was our main priority rather than the competition.”
Moser agreed and said he’s been proud of his students for tackling the challenge. Plus, in the end, the project is not only helping the community, but it’s also doing exactly what the competition was designed to do - to encourage students’ interest in STEM.
“When they were doing the petri dishes with the UV, I keep them in my back closet and there were kids I can trust. They would just come in, dig in and they’d start looking at what grew and what didn’t,” Moser said. “It’s exciting to see as a teacher when kids get excited about it.”
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