For this exhibition, we had to create an item that would somehow benefit another person or group of people in some way. Some people made chicken pens, small scale bunk beds, zen gardens, solar powered heater, and water filters. My group and I decided on a combination of solar power and water filtration. We came up with an idea to make what we called a biosand cooler. The way it works is you have a cooler, or something that can maintain low temperatures and you divide it into two halves somehow. Then on one half you create a biosand filter, which is a method of filtering water that uses sand, gravel, and smaller gravel that filters 98% of particles and bacteria that resided within the original water. On the other half, we were planning on having a solar powered cooling systems where some miniature fans were connected to a rechargeable battery that was hooked up to a solar panel that would cool water that has been filtered by the biosand filter, thus making the water clean, and after a while, cold. Unfortunately, by the time exhibition came around, we could only manage having the biosand filter part installed in the cooler because we were unable to separate the cooler using plexiglass. If we had a saw blade that was fine enough to cut the plexiglass to the desired measurements, we could have pulled it off, but unfortunately that was not the case. Other than that, we ran tests on water to see how cold it could get just by fans and it dropped a noticeable temperature below room temperature. We had our fans working as well, but the separation of the cooler was able to hold us back enough so that we were unable to complete the entire project.
Below are links to the instrucatble that I created for my group and our website created by Kalea Miyoshi