A Wooster School student was recently selected as a finalist for the Brazilian International Science and Engineering Fair and represented the United States with her polymer project. Isha Patel of Danbury will be presenting another one of her ideas, called the "Green Sleep Project," at the Global Student Leadership Summit this spring in Canada.
The 11th grader hopes both of her ideas can help protect the environment.
Wooster officials say during her trip to Brazil in November, Patel got to see performances of finalists from around the world and answer questions about the U.S., sharing her own stories with attendees.
There were 420 projects and over 800 students from high school from 21 different countries.
Patel's project was about creating an adsorptive microporous polymer for textile dye filtration. Wooster says she created a polymer using shrimp shell waste, coconut husk waste, and potato starch. Water gets poured into the top of a cylinder and comes out clean. When it becomes saturated, the polymer will act like fertilizer, providing nutrients to a plant and it will retain water.
