Assam students excel in global scientific project on water

Three teams of school children from Assam – two from Nagaon and one from Tezpur in Sonitpur district – have made excellent presentation in a global teleconferencing coordinated by the civil engineering department of North Dakota State University of the USA on Wednesday on their project on Rediscovering Water. At the final review after the teleconferencing, the coordinator from North Dakota State University commented that the projects presented were interesting and seemed to be sustainable. “Now we are exploring how we can give some scholarships to these children so that they can continue these particular studies to further level". Rediscovering Water is an International initiatives of North Dakota State University of USA for popularising method of science among the school children. The programme is aimed at stimulating research in water and waste-water and train the younger generation with the skills necessary to carry out scientific research to purify water and make it available to mankind and others in our environment.

The programme has been necessitated as there is lots of water in this world but very less to drink. The programme facilitates some basic research globally so as to come with a up a design to treat human urine and greywater (water from baths, sinks, and washing machines) in order to make the finished water drinkable. The project explores Wastewater Recycling possibilities using standard Engineering Process Design.

Children participants in the project will learn how to work in a group environment, how to carry out scientific research, data collection, analysis, and interpretation, design a treatment system to treat wastewater, learn that failures teach us lessons too and learn how to maintain a research notebook Participating in a teleconferencing organised by North Dakota State University, team of children researchers from Kendriya Vidyalaya, Tezpur University earned accolade for their presentation on ‘use of blue-green algae to remove unwanted salt in water in order to reduce alkalinity’ and treatment development. The team of children scientist was coordinated by Tezpur University in the teleconferencing.

Similarly, two teams of children scientists who were coordinated by Society for Socio-economic Awareness and Environment Protection (SSEAEP), made presentation on their work in the teleconferencing which was held in NIC conference hall in Nagaon. The teams were from Sankardev Sisu Bidya Nekaton and Nowgong Bengali Girls’ High School. Bidya Niketan team made presentation on their project on designing a filtration processing through improvisation of traditional sand, stone and charcoal filter where soft sand, activated carbon, rough sand, pebbles, s tones, filter paper used for iron, turbidity and hardness removal and lime, salt, Kolakhar, filter paper used for bacteria treatment.

The Bengali Girls’ High School team made presentation on their work on ‘Iron Removal from water collected from tube well using charcoal’. Setting ball rolling for the teleconferencing, Dean Faculty of Engineering Sciences of North Dakota State University, Prof. Gary Smith said, “This is an initiative to develop a young scientific brigade all over the world who can solve different environment related problems faced by the human beings through different scientific approaches.”

Prof Mihir Kumar Choudhury, VC of Tezpur University in his comments during the tele-conference appreciated the initiative and interesting research approach to inculcate method of science among young children.