Nova Pioneer students recently participated in the Kenya Science and Engineering Fair (KSEF) formally known as Science Congress, 57th Edition at the county level. Four Nova Pioneer work groups emerged top four out of 39 schools in the specific categories.
We dive deeper into the top-ranked project in the Agriculture category: The Automatic Chicken Drinker. Amor Rehema and Michelle Adika (Form 2) tell us more about their project and their thoughts behind it.
What is your project about and what is the aim?
Our project is simply a chicken drinker. What makes it unique? it is automatic and time-saving. Our main aim for this project is to reduce the amount of time a farmer would take to re-fill the currently used system, hoppers, and recover the energy wasted for chicken drinkers.
What are some limitations of your solution?
A challenge we have faced in our project is finding a way to make this economical for the farmers by restructuring it to function without a constant supply of water. We had a few challenges in making improvements on the drinker to make it suitable for chicks to use especially because they can easily jump into the basin and completely block water flow.
What Inspired you to come up with this project?
As two aspiring scientists who had just learned the Hooke’s law, we were eager to apply our newly found interest. We heard about KSEF and when given the opportunity we signed up with no project in mind yet. Since we are both in the same table group, we came up with different ideas that we found impossible before realizing that if you stretch a spring and have something to block the end, it can stop the flow of a liquid in a container. We knew nothing about agriculture but applied the Physics we knew and hoped it would improve the agricultural field.
Have you implemented any feedback from the last round?
Our project was initially taller and we were advised to make the stand shorter for it to be more realistic we applied this and the project now is more practical and easier to understand.
What are your aspirations for this project?
Kenya is aspiring to be an industrialized middle-income country by the year 2030. If we manufacture such simple innovations, this goal will be attained faster than we think. We hope to get to the international fair and compete with great minds and projects. We also hope to get academic scholarships and for the government and farmers to actually consider our idea and improve it. We want to change the world not because we were taught that we must but becomes we can.
