A group of Arizona ninth graders is participating in a national competition that asks students to identify a problem in their area and use engineering to help solve it.
The Chaparral High School students are in Virginia this week, showing off their invention.
It’s part of eCYBERMISSION, a STEM competition for sixth to ninth grade students that promotes teamwork, self-discovery, and the real-life applications of STEM.
Fifteen-year-old Ira Parsons, the Chaparral team’s student leader, said they decided to focus on Arizona’s drought.
“So we were actually inspired by Star Wars and we designed a moisture harvester that would collect that water from the air because even in a place like Arizona, where the humidity is in the single digits, there’s actually a massive amount of water vapor in the air,” Parsons said.
Parsons said by using two kilograms of a special material, the system they designed would be able to collect almost seven liters of water a day.
“It’s like a little chemical sponge that just collects water out of the air like nobody’s business and we run it in cycles,” Parsons said. “It absorbs the water out of the air that we move through the device and then we collect that out of the material at the end of the cycle.”
More information can be found on the team’s website at azwaterwarriors.org/.
