Team:Gaston Day School/Design
Design
Choosing our Project
To choose our project, our team brainstormed many directions that we could take. We decided, because water quality is degrading, especially in North Carolina, and since unclean water has affected many of our team members, that we needed to help fix this problem. Our next decision we had to make was deciding what part of the water quality we wanted to focus on. After researching problems in our area, we came to the conclusion that heavy metals and thermal pollution were problems that are extremely harmful to the environment and usually are not as publically addressed.
Deciding which water project:
Designing our Lab
After this, we researched others who have tried this and studied what their results were and started to construct the genes that we wanted. We chose lead, cadmium, and arsenic as the heavy metal we wanted to detect because they are the main elements in coal ash. We also chose to use green, blue and red pigments with metal-specific promotors. We choose these non-florescent proteins so our color detector can detect the appearance of the pollutants and can be seen without the use of specialized equipment.
What do we need to do?
Wet Lab
We used functional testing to ensure our cadmium detector works. Because our facilities are shared with elementary and middle school students, we had to limit the exposure of cadmium. We bought just the needed amount of cadmium and added the water into the container in a chemical fume hood to reduce the risk of having cadmium in the air. We then finished the lab, using water and food dye for the control, and analyzed our data.
Building our Device
An Arduino board with a color sensor attached to it is used to detect the color red, green, and blue. The data that it gets transfer to an Android app using a BlueTooth connection. Since we only have the cadmium working, whenever the app receives data of the color red it will send a notification alerting the user of the contamination. The device is self-maintain with a battery that is powered by solar panels.
What happens when tired brains try to storm:
Design
Choosing our Project
To choose our project, our team brainstormed many directions that we could take. We decided, because water quality is degrading, especially in North Carolina, and since unclean water has affected many of our team members, that we needed to help fix this problem. Our next decision we had to make was deciding what part of the water quality we wanted to focus on. After researching problems in our area, we came to the conclusion that heavy metals and thermal pollution were problems that are extremely harmful to the environment and usually are not as publically addressed.
Deciding which water project:
Designing our Lab
After this, we researched others who have tried this and studied what their results were and started to construct the genes that we wanted. We chose lead, cadmium, and arsenic as the heavy metal we wanted to detect because they are the main elements in coal ash. We also chose to use green, blue and red pigments with metal-specific promotors. We choose these non-florescent proteins so our color detector can detect the appearance of the pollutants and can be seen without the use of specialized equipment.
What do we need to do?
Wet Lab
We used functional testing to ensure our cadmium detector works. Because our facilities are shared with elementary and middle school students, we had to limit the exposure of cadmium. We bought just the needed amount of cadmium and added the water into the container in a chemical fume hood to reduce the risk of having cadmium in the air. We then finished the lab, using water and food dye for the control, and analyzed our data.
Building our Device
An Arduino board with a color sensor attached to it is used to detect the color red, green, and blue. The data that it gets transfer to an Android app using a BlueTooth connection. Since we only have the cadmium working, whenever the app receives data of the color red it will send a notification alerting the user of the contamination. The device is self-maintain with a battery that is powered by solar panels.
What happens when tired brains try to storm: