Last week Argyle High School junior, Zara Majid was awarded a patent after working with a local company to invent a more effective way to purify communal water fountains.
At the beginning of her eighth grade year Zara joined a local group of students, whose main goal was to find practical solutions to some of the common challenges the world is facing.
“Every meeting we would get together, and then list out tons of problems that we wanted to try and find solutions for,” student Zara Maijid said. “Then from there, we really had to think about which ones we could actually make happen, as well as which ones could get patented.”
While coming up with effective solutions was no easy task, eventually the group came up with a new type of water purification, which was centered towards communal water fountains.
“Our idea is specifically focused on water fountains, and how we could put a little UV light inside of the fountains that would clean the spigot that water goes through, “ Zara said.” By doing this we are disinfecting the spigot on the fountain, as well as purifying the water.”
As their idea took off the team worked together to come up with a plan of how they would bring their idea off of paper, and into the real world.
“It took about nine months to go through the whole layout of everything, and start finding ways to make the UV light work,” Zara said.” After we finished putting our idea together we presented it to our director and shipped it off to a patent lawyer.”
After waiting a couple weeks the group received the response that their new water purification system would be receiving an award on Sunday, September 17.
“Our group’s main goal was to solve everyday problems that the world faces, and having a reliable way to get purified water is something that our community needs,” Zara said. “Contaminated water causes kids to die every year, and even though it may be a small issue to our community, several other areas around us face this detrimental issue everyday. So if we can make a small difference that’s all that matters.”
