Last spring, Whiting School Professor Erica Schoenberger challenged student teams in her Engineering for Sustainable Development class to design a sustainable development technology. Pretend there is a $50,000 award at stake, she added.
Then suddenly, life imitated academia when Schoenberger learned that the Odebrecht Organization, a global engineering firm, was offering a $40,000 prize for just such a project.
Sangkyun Cho ’13, a ChemBE major, had convinced friends Victor Oh ’12 (current master’s student) and Jay Choi ’14, majoring in applied mathematics and statistics, to sign up for the course together last spring. Fast-forward to October, and the student team found themselves winning second place in a field of 174 universities, bringing home $15,000 for themselves, Schoenberger, and Johns Hopkins.
“Knowing that as a student your ideas could make an impact was a great experience,” Cho says. “It gave me more confidence.”
When they first got the assignment, the team bounced around some ideas. Cars? Renewable energy? Cho called a friend who had grown up in Kenya and Uganda. What kinds of products did those countries need? The answer surprised them: school supplies.
It made sense, though. Education is essential, and without supplies, kids can’t do schoolwork. The team decided to focus on the most basic item of all: paper. The challenge was to make it sustainable, affordable, and a good fit for Ethiopia, their chosen location. Weeks of research and discussion later, they settled on a device that combines traditional paper making processes with modern materials science, relying on agricultural waste for both fuel and raw material. They named it Pegasus: Paper for Education, Growth, and Sustainability.
Their design for Pegasus calls for a three-part, stainless steel cylinder, about 4 feet high and 2 feet in diameter, weighing about 66 pounds. Rice husks go in the top section, which grinds them like a pepper mill, and fall into the middle stage, where they get mixed with water into a pulp. In the final stage, the pulp is spread onto a drying rack.
Schoenberger, a professor of geography and environmental engineering, says she was deeply impressed by the team’s commitment to service, the way they tailored the design for its destination, and their technical insight. Pegasus was the only project in her class to enter the Odebrecht competition, which was held in the U.S. for the first time this year. The first-place team, from Rice University, designed a floating city to house offshore oil workers. “It’s an elegant machine,” Schoenberger says of the Hopkins student design. “I think any engineer could be proud of it.” For the Hopkins team members, there’s something else, too. Pegasus helped them learn things that had never come up in their other courses, which have focused on abstractions and advanced technology. Through the experience of creating such a practical design, they say, they were able to make the connection between their academic work and the kind of service they imagine devoting their lives to. “The course was one of the best in undergrad because it tied together everything I want to do in the future,” says Oh.
That future, the team members say, is likely to include things like grad school, med school, and work with nongovernmental organizations. They are committed to taking Pegasus beyond the design stage and building a prototype. Schoenberger has already asked them to return to her class this spring as guest lecturers.