Kids solving social ills with science
Canadian science whizzes rise to social challenges, write Marc and Craig Kielburger.
Imagine a bustling conference room, packed with inventors and their new, revolutionary technologies.
One display boasts a cheap, fast diagnostic test to catch the earliest stages of HIV in rural overseas communities. On the next table, a hyper-efficient filter removes toxins from oilsands tailing ponds. Beside it, there’s a futuristic airflow system that prevents virus transmission in airplane cabins.
This is not a convention of high-tech CEOs or a reunion of Nobel Prize winners. It’s the Canada-Wide Science Fair, where an emerging generation of teen science whizzes is skipping the baking-soda volcano and tackling Ebola, pollution, poverty and many other social problems.
Many of the mind-blowing gadgets and discoveries that will solve our greatest global challenges will be devised by people too young for a driver’s licence.
Hit TV shows like Big Bang Theory and Project MC2 have made being brainy cool, and young tech phenoms like Mark Zuckerberg give today’s teens something to strive for.
“Kids are designing things that no one else has even thought of,” says Brad McCabe, executive director of Youth Science Canada, the non-profit that organizes regional and national science fairs. “Being young, they haven’t had parameters put around their imagination. There are no walls boxing them in to what’s possible.”
When Canadian science-fair star Alex Deans was 12, he spotted a woman who looked lost at a busy corner in Windsor, Ont. He left his group of friends to help, and found that the woman was blind and her guide dog had recently died. It would take weeks, and $40,000, to train a new one. A cane is helpful, she told him, but not enough to navigate the city.
Weeks later, the preteen with a passion for robots had an epiphany about how to help blind individuals while he was watching a TV show about bats. The poorly-sighted winged critters use a sonar system called echolocation to navigate their surroundings. Why couldn’t blind humans do the same?
After tinkering with his robotics kit and hitting a dead end, Alex sought inspiration on the Internet. He found Detroit I3, a posse of retired engineers who built random inventions in a warehouse across the river from Windsor. The eager mentors nudged Alex over a hump with some coaching on software coding. After two years of weekend experimenting, Alex brought the first iAid prototype to the CNIB for volunteers to test.
The device features four sensors worn on a belt that detect walls and other hazards, and trigger a joystick in an individual’s hand that then directs them on along safe route.
Alex, now 18, went on to refine the device. Now he’s seeking out companies to produce and market the iAid to the public.
It’s an extraordinary story, but not uncommon at the modern Canadian science fair.
Vancouver teens Raymond Wang and Nicole Ticea took first and second place at last spring’s International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh. Raymond read a headline about viruses, like swine flu, being transmitted among airplane passengers. So he designed a system to filter air more efficiently aboard planes. It essentially blocks disease and virus particles from floating from one passenger to another.
Nicole read that HIV often goes undiagnosed in remote villages because tests are expensive and results take weeks. She sent dozens of emails to university professors until one allowed her into a lab to concoct a solution: a small chip that can check a drop of blood for HIV instantly, similar to a pregnancy test.
Both Raymond and Nicole — and other science wunderkinds — are further developing their inventions and hope they will be used around the globe in the future.
So if you want to change the world, buy the young people in your life a chemistry set, or sign them up for a course on coding. By their next birthday, they may have solved world hunger.