Four students win a global science prize for a harbour-cleaning robot
Four students from Cape Town have won the Global Young Science Prize for a robot that skims plastic debrisdebrisbits of rubbish left floating off the surface of their harbour. The robot runs for six hours on one charge and fills a basket the size of a school bag.
The competition had entries from 62 countries. Judges said the winning inventioninventionsomething new that someone makes for the first time stood out because it solved a problem the team could see from their own classroom window. "We built it for our own harbour first," said Thandi, 13.
To build it the four had to collaboratecollaboratework together with other people with a boat mechanic, a physics teacher and one another. They tested fourteen versions before one worked in choppy water.
The globalglobalinvolving the whole world, not just one country prize comes with enough funding to build 500 more units, and a group of engineers will help the team make the robot cheaper and safer to repair.
The team is already sketching a second one with a solar panel, so it can stay out all day without coming back to the slipway to charge — for now it is still only a prototypeprototype/ˈprəʊtətaɪp/an early version of something, built to test whether the idea works.
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