She’s in sixth grade and she’s already saving the world.
Anna Du is 12-years-old. She can’t drink, she can’t drive, and she can’t vote. She can, however, see a problem and offer a solution—and she offered something awesome: an ROV that can spot plastic on the seafloor.
For eight years running, the Broadcom Foundation has been putting on the Broadcom Masters competition, a contest that focusses on science, technology, engineering, and math achievements by young people. Thanks to her invention, Du is one of the 30 finalists. According to The Smithsonian, “nearly 5,000 sixth, seventh and eighth graders were nominated after competing in regional science fairs, and of those, 2,500 applied online for consideration. That pool was narrowed down to 300 projects dubbed “Broadcom Masters,” and now the top 30 finalists are currently gathered in Washington, D.C. to showcase their projects.” The winner will receive $25,000.
The young genius’s ROV is made from simple PVC pipes and has a system for navigation and a system for detecting plastic. Using propellers to move forward, it employs fishing weights and pool floats to move up or down. The detection system is a little more complex, or, as Du puts it, “the cool part.” An infrared camera paired with lights that produce different wavelengths of infrared light “illuminate the absorption spectra in microplastics and make them stand out from the sand and plant life.”
While her invention doesn’t pick the trash up, it is a useful tool in figuring out just how much there is and where it is accumulating.
“She has an impressive basic kind of engineering instinct to break down a problem like this and then go after it,” Casey Machado, an engineer, told The Smithsonian. “She was able to follow that up with the technical work, construction, and design to make a working prototype, which is very cool. It sounds simple, but it’s a level of thinking that’s really impressive.”
Using the ROV, Du’s next plan of attack is to create a system that can predict where the biggest accumulations of plastic will occur. “I know I want to be an engineer because I like building things to help solve world problems,” says Du. “But I’m not sure what kind of engineer I want to be yet.
