The Cupertino Courier

Education

Aqua-Ducks rise to meet 21st annual tech challenge

By Emilie Crofton

Many women and children in countries throughout Africa are forced to carry heavy buckets of water for long distances in order to get drinking water. Five girls from Sunnyvale Middle School have created a device that could change that.

The Aqua-Ducks, an all-girls team of seventh- and eighth-grade students from Sunnyvale Middle, are participating in the 21st annual Tech Challenge, which challenges students to create solutions to a real-world problem.

This year's challenge addresses the worldwide need for clean and safe drinking water. Teams have to design a simple device to deliver water from a stream to a village on a hill without the benefit of electricity.

Shravya Dindu, Anisha Gaitonde, Cissy Ji, Carmelle Koren and Jasmine Park make up one of the few all-girls teams in the 250-team competition. The two- to six-member teams come from schools around the area, including Cupertino, Kennedy and Lawson middle schools and Cupertino High School.

"This experience has shown us that as girls, we don't have any boundaries," says 13-year-old Anisha, the team captain. "We can shoot for the stars."

Marianne Kruze, a computer teacher at Sunnyvale Middle, was instrumental in assembling the team with the help of The Alliance of Technology & Women, a nonprofit organization that promotes math, science and technology to females.

"I wanted the girls to be aware that they could be successful in engineering," she says. "Seeing them working on this reminds me of why I went into this business. It's like seeing flowers opening before my eyes."

The girls have been working every Saturday since January, brainstorming, building and testing their device at Northrop Grumman's Marine Systems Division, where they receive support from an all-female engineer advisory group.

The Aqua-Ducks are also mentored by two St. Francis High School students, Anisha Sekar and Veronica Hume, although the girls are left to make their own mistakes and figure out solutions to problems.

"We were looking to build a device that was efficient, simple, durable, safe and cost-effective," Anisha says. "At first we were going to build a water wheel, but after using a decision matrix, we realized a hydraulic ram would be best."

Using the power of the stream, their device can collect five quarts of water in three minutes.

The event and judging day of the Tech Challenge, an annual Thech Museum of Innovation event in downtown San Jose, is scheduled May 3.

"It's exciting. This could be something used to help Third World countries," Carmelle says. "It was a lot of work, but I'm really happy and I'm definitely doing it again next year."

For more information on the 21st annual Tech Challenge, visit http://techchallenge.thetech.org.