This year for Projects Competition, I did a Category 1 Project – experimental research. The project was titled: Removing heavy metal ions from water using marine algae. After grueling rounds of judging and countless obstacles, the Project Competition is finally over. I believe that it is important that I reflect on the Project Competition, especially since I am the leader for the project group.
I believe that the most important element to a good project is a good topic. Some topics are more difficult to do and yet less appealing to the audience. Others are easy to do, very feasible and have a wide range of applications. Such topics have a strong appeal from the audience. Such topics often concern the environment. Environmental destruction is a very hot topic, very intensely debated and very urgent. Thus, my group and I decided to focus on solving an environment problem. We sourced through the seemingly endless list of past projects and found a few topics which are quite suitable to do. One of them which interested us was about heavy metal pollution. A few hundred years ago, people heavy metal pollution was completely unheard of and not seen at all. However, only recently due to the rapid increase in industries such as mining, metal plating, pesticides etc, is the problem of heavy metal pollution becoming a serious one. Such heavy metals such as mercury can even be toxic at parts per million concentrations. Many other heavy metal ions are also known to be carcinogenic. Heavy metal ions are also easily absorbed by plants and animals and can accumulate in organisms and in the food chain. Due to such a strong need to solve heavy metal ion pollution, we decided to investigate ways to solving it.
There are many ways to removing heavy metal ions: chemical precipitation, ion-exchange, adsorption and filtration. Chemical precipitation refers to causing the metal ions to form insoluble compounds and precipitate out of the solution. Hydroxide precipitation and sulfide precipitation are amongst the most common forms. Metal precipitation, however, produces lots of toxic metal sludge which needs to be disposed of somewhere else. Ion exchange is something like the double displacement reactions we learn in chemistry. Heavy metal ions in the solution would replace the cations on the ion exchange resins and bind to the resins. While ion exchange is very effective for concentrated solutions, it is expensive for dilute solution. Adsorption is the result of inter-molecular bonding such as dipole-dipole bonding between the pollutants and the adsorbent. Adsorption is especially useful for removing organic pollutants but is ineffective for removing ions. Filtration involves passing solutions through a membrane. Reverse osmosis is one such example and it is very effective. However, to pump water to such great pressure through a semi-permeable membrane, it is also very expensive.
One possible solution is bioadsorption, which means using biological material to adsorb metal ions. It is different from bioaccumulation whereby the living things take in trace mineral while they are alive. Bioadsorbants are cheap and widely available. Hence, we decided to hunt for various materials which are suitable for adsorption. We found marine algae, or put simply seaweed. And that was how we found such a good topic.
Soon, we arrived at our first obstacle, Prelims. It was an easy obstacle though. By following closely to the judging rubrics, we eased past it. However, the judges did point out a few mistakes. One of them was that we were not specific in our hypothesis. After the Prelims, we quickly reviewed through our hypothesis and addressed the problem.
Right after our first problem, we arrived at our second. We found out that obtaining marine algae was not easy as it appeared. At first, we thought we could order them. However, many suppliers sold them in quantities which were either too big (1 metric ton) or too small (those samples which are for looking under a microscope). Eventually, we decided to settle for the most unwanted solution – sourcing for marine algae along the beaches. At first, we thought that there would have been very little to find as we thought that marine algae would be found in deep waters. However, we were wrong. Marine algae were everywhere. Some of the rocks were even completely covered by marine algae. They had all been washed up on the shore. In the end, we managed to collect a lot of marine algae.
Then, it came to the actual doing part. The doing part was not as easy as it appeared. I had to go down to the laboratory at least 3 times a week to do the experiment. It was very time consuming. Many of my group members were frustrated that they had go down to the laboratory many times. I told them to just persist on – that the fruit of their labour would be sweet. They eventually agreed and their frustration vanished.
However, things got messier when the school term started. People started to have their hectic schedules – from CCA to ACE project. My group members started to lose focus. To make matters worse, we had come to our second judging round: the semi-finals. This was the most important round as it was worth 30 marks which was 60% of the total project marks. It could make or break us. I stressed its importance to my group members. We worked hard, rehearsed many times for it and hoped for the best. Eventually, our efforts paid off and we scored 24 marks, which was the third highest amongst the Sec 2s. I could tell that my group members be very elated. On the contrary, I was not, because the battle may be over but the war was not. We still had to go through the finals round. I did not want to get complacent and neither did I want my group members to get complacent.
Then, one month later, came our last and toughest battle: the finals. Last year, I did not go into the finals round and thus was completely unsure of how difficult it was or what we needed to do. I was clueless and so were my other group members. It was like we did not know what to expect. For example, on the last day of the webreport submission, we were almost late as we did not expect the uploading to be so problematic. For example, we realised that chemical formulas appeared as H2O instead of H2O. Some of our pictures could not be displayed properly. We all became very stressed out and very worried. A few days later, when our mentor told us a piece of bad news, the pictures still could not be displayed correctly. And it was too late to change. We learned an important lesson: always finish your work ahead of time to prevent last minute cramming and avoid making unnecessary mistakes.
Before we knew it, the day of oral judging arrived. I was quite nervous. I could even feel my arms trembling, but I told myself that there was no use being nervous and took a deep breath. Our oral presentation went smoothly but what killed us was next. During the Q and A session, the judges attacked us ruthlessly with questions. One of the most difficult questions to answer was: Could you show us the photographs of you guy collecting the marine algae? I could not answer as we did not take any photos. I was stunned. I thought that we would definitely do badly. I tried to look on the bright side. At least now I know that we need to include as many pictures as possible to proof that we really did the experiments.
A week later, the results were out. We had scored 8 out of 10 marks. I was overjoyed. We were also the top in the Sec 2 cohort for our category. It turned out that our efforts and persistence have paid off.
From this project, I learned many important values. I learned about persistence. We faced setback after setback, but we did not give up. At first, we thought that we had no way of obtaining marine algae, but we eventually did. We spent a lot of time at the laboratory, so much that sometimes we felt like forgetting about the project completely. We did not. We decided to persist on. We also learned to communicate our ideas with clarity and precision using pictures. A picture tells a thousand words. A picture is proof of our work. Most of all, we learned the Hwa Chong motto of 自强不息. Even though we did well for the semi-finals, we did not settle for that score. While other groups chose to slack after the semi-finals, we pushed ourselves to the limit. That was how we got 42 points in total – the highest amongst all of the Sec 2 experimental research projects. Now, presenting the link to our web report. I hope that you will enjoy it.
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