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Young scientists win big
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Two Bangalore students have won The Global Challenge, an international science competition, beating 2,600 students from around the world
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Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.
EUREKA MOMENTS Meghna Das and Pranav Pai are getting set to head to Vermont for science course
“It’s hard work, and you’ll find it tough balancing with school, but it’s worth it. The exposure is great and for students with a serious interest in science, it’s a terrific opportunity,” is what Me
ghna Das and Pranav Pai say when I ask them for a message for students who might read this.
Meghna, has joined BSc microbiology in Mount Carmel and Pranav, who has done the CET and is waiting to start engineering, with team mates Rudhdi Karnik and Brian Mason, in the USA, have just been announced winners of The Global Challenge, an international science competition in which, this year, 2,600 students took part.
The Global Challenge, founded in 2005, is a problem-solving competition that requires student teams to work on a science-related issue, which is evaluated at every stage on four counts: STEM applications (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), business plan, group diversity and overall outlook.
What makes Global Challenge particularly tricky is the business plan. This requires teams to ‘place’ their projects in three countries and to elucidate on the financial and political feasibility of setting up such a project.
And, all this has to be done using the principles enunciated in Thomas L. Friedman’s study of globalisation — “The World is Flat” — and William McDonough & Michael Braungart’s book on the need for ecologically sound industrial design — “Cradle to Cradle”.
Competition from other teams (four students to a team, with two mandatorily from the US), is stiff.Meghna and Pranav’s team “Innovatech” placed first in three categories and second in the ‘business plan’ section.
Innovatech researched and blueprinted a system of using green algae to control carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants, while putting the by-products to use as biofuel — in USA, China, and India.
“It was a tough process, and took us a long time,”Meghna says wryly. It was Pranav’s chance viewing of a spoofy Discovery Channel response to global warming — sinking algae-infested iron ships to the ocean floor — that got them thinking about algae.
From then it was research and more research, and a sense of being overwhelmed. The eureka moment, however, did come.
They found MIT-based GreenFuel, who had a patented and functional unit at MIT using blue-green algae to work on carbon dioxide, creating solid and liquid by-products that could be used as biofuels ( www.greenfuelonline.org).
Once Meghna and Pranav, discovered GreenFuel, they were off.
They put out their proposal with several hundred others on the Global Challenge website and after several exchanges of enquiry and rejections, finally they had their dream team Innovatech.
Working online, fitting time schedules to exams and other work, all these hurdles took a long time ironing out before they had their work going seriously.
If finding GreenFuel’s work was a major boon, not having access to their actual costing proved to be their toughest challenge.
GreenFuel, helpful with other information refused to divulge costs and Innovatech did their financial analysis based on assumed numbers.
Despite all hurdles, Innovatech stood first in The Global Challenge. Team members have won a cash prize plus a week’s paid science course in Vermont.
Meghna and Pranav are proud of their work. They feel that GreenFuel’s work with algae was an eye-opener and that their gains were many. They point to the need for schools to plug into these circuits and add that family encouragement goes a long way.
The two are looking forward to their course in Vermont, and are already discussing possible areas of interest.
(For details of this year’s Global Challenge Awards, log onto: www.globalchallengeaward.org)
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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