A team of five students at Montessori School La Florida in Spain investigated the use of a home-made filter to measure the cleanliness of water using a variety of tests.
The project by team members Elias Casariego Font, Hugo de Miguel Monge, Jaime Galilea García, Alvaro Merino Kopyrin and Jimena Garcia-Pumarino Gómez was declared the Best in Europe.
The judges said: “This is a well-researched project thoughtfully providing a portfolio of reasons regarding the cleanliness of a specimen of water, ranging from dissolved solute to particulate matter. The team demonstrated good experimental skills showing a high level of chemistry knowledge.”
Describing their experience, the students said:
“Our project is about filtering water with a homemade filter, and then testing if it’s pure or not… On the first day we didn’t have the materials we needed, we did research and developed our ideas and planned what we were going to do. We looked at government papers which were very effective because they had a lot of information which gave us lots of different variables and questions that were later investigated. We also were looking at NGOs such as Greenpeace, which has lots of information about our topic.”
“We all worked well together. We were very happy with the news [that we had won]. Our teacher Ms. Huurman knew it was difficult and the chances were slim. However, she said it was a good project topic. When she gave us the news, we were surprised and ecstatic.”