Congratulations to 7th graders Lauren Balint, Emma Gasbarro, Ava Mazur and Samantha Steele who earned third place in a statewide ThermoFisher Scientific STEM Design competition against more than 400 teams from across Pennsylvania!

“It feels amazing,” Ava said. “It’s a great accomplishment, and it’s because we worked together so well. If we were going to do well, we knew we had to take it into our hands to work together. We had all of the right people to do that.”

The STEM competition traditionally revolves around the agricultural field and students collaboratively creating solutions to real world problems, Emma said.

“There are a lot of challenges that people face across the world,” Emma said. “We had to research what we would want to fix, come up with a prototype and design, have a journal with a lot of research and information on our problem and how we would fix it.”

The team, which earned a perfect score at regionals to qualify for states, focused on creating a filtration system that could be used in third world countries.

“Our filtration system would be placed under bridges to filter rocks, trash, plastics, microplastics and bacteria to produce clean water,” Lauren said.

The most challenging part of the competition, Samantha said, was making sure every component of their project tied in together for their presentation.

“There was a lot that we had to do,” Samantha said. “One of the pieces of feedback we got at states was that we had too much research, which we didn’t think would be possible.”

The team hopes to do similar competitions in the future with the same slogan: “Stop the pollution and let us be the solution!”

Good Luck in your future competitions!