Cesar Harada wants to solve the problem of global water pollution, and is also very concerned about creating the next generations of citizen scientists. We've written about Harada before and his Protei project but in his new TED Talk How I teach kids to love science he discusses his methods for teaching the STEM mindset.
As a teacher at the Hong Kong Harbour School, Harada and his students often noticed garbage on the beaches and plastic in the water. He and his team modified the classroom into a workspace so the kids could build sketch models of ideas they might have to clean up water. Cesar says that his job is to take the best of each student's idea and turn it into a viable solution. Kids are always excited about robots and an ROV was built that could move slowly through the water and sense the size of particles. Using the particle data an estimate was developed for how much plastic is in the water.
Students also saw a picture of a beach in Bangladesh and a child trying to clean up an oil spill by hand. They again brainstormed and built a rough spectrometer to identify the different pollutants in the water, and sent it to Bangladesh. Later Harada and his students studied the Fukushima disaster and its ongoing cleanup efforts. Using his data and ideas from the kids Cesar built a topographical map and used pigment to represent radioactivity and sprayed mist to simulate rainfall. This gave the team a better idea of how radioactive dust was moving from ground zero to surrounding waterways.
For me Harada's greatest achievement is taking his students and putting them to work on a local problem, then what he calls a remote problem in Bangladesh, to the global problem of Japanese radioactivity. This is a great inspiring talk that speaks to the maker, citizen scientist and inventor in all of us.