Sci flies high as kids show off their projects at fest

VASHI: Students from several city schools, Raigad and Thane came up with unique scientific models on problems troubling their locality at the state-level competition called Inspire Award that kicked off on September 24 at Modern School in Vashi.
The contest was conceived and conceptualized by the Directorate of Science and Technology. The event is being coordinated and organized by N B Chavan, deputy director, education, Mumbai and Ashok Misal, education officer.
Students picked up ideas from their own local problem to make creative working models displayed at State Level Inspire Award competition held at Modern school Vashi.
At the competition, Vaibhav Deshmukh from IES Manik Vidyalaya, Bandra reclamation displayed how housing societies can recycle waste water. and usedused for regular use.
The water scarcity in Mumbai compelled him to think about it.
Another class X student Hiralal Purohit from Vanita Vishram High School, Khetwadi said, "My village has many rotating mechanism working day and night , like pulleys, crop crushers, butter churners, bullock feed oil crushers and many more machines working all day, but there is no electricity. So, I had an idea to attach a small gen -set kind of motor to these machines to churn out electricity to convert mechanical energy into electrical."
Several other interesting projects relating to the necessities of daily life like computerized agriculture, lightweight trolley for farmers and daily labourers and computerized poultry farming were also on display.
Richal Abhang from Holy Angel High School, Mumbai had made an environment-friendly project. She described how oil can be separated from water in case of an oil spill ( pointing towards last year's oil spill) with polypropylene. She also showed how bio-diesel can be manufactured from oil waste.
The projects selected for the national level contest will be announced on September 26 after a three-day-long evaluation by a panel of judges.
A total of 181 projects were displayed at the fest.
Viswas Korde, the co-ordinator from Navi Mumbai said, "Two projects were chosen from each school. The students who worked on the projects have been awarded Rs5,000. Only the top 10 will compete at the national-level contest."
Most of students who participated in the contest said that they are ready to pursue different streams like aerospace, electronics, computer designing and more from here ( India).
Some of them have already started preparing for the IIT-JEE and other engineering examinations. The education system and environment here is much better than the institutes abroad, said the students.