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POTTSTOWN >> A Pottstown High School senior was recently selected to attend a national forum that shows students about the fields of engineering and science.
Pottstown High School senior Zachary Beekley was nominated by teacher Andy Bachman to attend the Envision National Youth Leadership Forum for Engineering.
This 8-day program was held at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. It provided hands-on experience with math and science skills that can be applied to the real world of engineering.
The forum took place from July 7 to July 14 and included about 200 teenagers. The program included lessons on design process and the different applications of the engineering field. Students spent about 10 hours in a classroom each day learning about the steps in the engineering design process and learning about their capstone project. The goal of their project was to design a water system for a small community in a third-world country, according to Beekley.
“My team was assigned Banlung, which is also sometimes called Krong Ban Lung, in Cambodia. We designed a system to pump water from a nearby volcanic crater lake, Yeak Laom Lake, into a water tower, which used gravity to distribute the water throughout the community of about 17,000 people,” explained Beekley in his publication, The Beekley Report.
“Yeak Laom Lake was chosen because it is the largest and cleanest source of water near the village. The team’s water system also included a sewage system to pump the used water from the community back into the lake after it was cleaned. The pumps are all powered by an array of solar panels which provide more than enough energy for each pump,” wrote Beekley.
Additionally, the team was tasked with determining the total cost of the system, which, according to Beekley, was about $400,000.
Students also worked with basic electronics wiring and basic coding to control an IR remote controlled helicopter.
“Throughout the trip, I learned more about the engineering design process, which fields of engineering I enjoy and might consider for a career, what college life may be like, and what I need to be a good applicant for a college I wish to attend. I will have a great story to tell at the start of school when a teacher asks me what I did during the summer,” wrote Beekley.