A group of teenagers from the Martin Luther King Community Center in Indianapolis won a trip to Silicon Valley with their prototype filtration device. The device was designed to filter water at Belmont Beach, which has been polluted with sewer and storm runoff water, industrial chemicals, and slaughterhouse waste for years.
On the surface, it doesn't look like much, but a prototype device held together by duct tape and anchored with plastic bottles could solve a problem plaguing an Indianapolis community for decades.
During segregation, the beach, nestled along the White River, was the only place where Black residents could swim. The teens learned about the beach's complicated history and built the filtration device.
They also made a documentary using tools and equipment at the Teen Tech Center.
The prototype floats on the surface of the water and filters pollutants. It provides data to a website where residents can get updates on what pollutants are in the river. This earned the teens a spot at FutureFest, an annual summer event held in Silicon Valley.
R'Quiya Ruffin, the Career Pathways facilitator at the Teen Tech Center, introduced the kids to Belmont Beach. She supported them at Future Fest and called the experience "surreal."
"They are a group of very unique and outspoken individuals. They were confident and made me feel like a proud mom," said Ruffin.
The teens toured Google and Adobe and networked with people they saw potential connections with.
Michael Catterlin, deputy director of Project Invent, says Future Fest is more about the journey to create the inventions than the inventions themselves. There's a push to make Belmont Beach a public gathering space and eventually a permanent park.
"For us, it's more of an emphasis on the learning journey and theory of change than the fanciest prototype," he said.
The teens plan to continue developing their prototypes with the tools they learned from Project Invent and will return to the Teen Tech Center to further the project.
They hope to improve the functionality of the filtration system by finding sustainable materials, creating a docking station, and improving the features that are supposed to detect what is being collected in the device.
