Solar Sisters at St. Patrick School outshine others to qualify for national competition

Saint Patrick School students, from left, Anna Sheaffer, 14, Claire Grindle, 14, Sarah Dabrowski, 14, and Hayden Hall, 15, prepare for the national Solar Challenge competition in Colorado.

Members of the Saint Patrick School solar challenge team, the Solar Sisters, prepare to take their project to the national competition which will take place May 14-17 at the University of Colorado.

Saint Patrick School Solar Sisters team, from left, Hayden Hall, 15, Anna Sheaffer, 14, Claire Grindle, 14, and Sarah Dabrowski, 14, will show off their skills at a national competition later this month.

The Saint Patrick School Solar Sisters, Hayden Hall, 15, Claire Grindle, 14, Anna Sheaffer, 14, Sarah Dabrowski, 14, pose with their solar project.

It can be nerve-racking moving a whole village halfway across a continent.

Add to that the complication of rigging the mock-up with a solar array to power a makeshift water supply system.

A team of eighth graders at Saint Patrick School are gearing up for the task after placing first in the Penn State Solar Challenge at State College in early April.

The state-level contest required the four girls to power a system that pumped water from one tank to another through a network of pipes built into a model home roughly 12 inches to a side.

Calling themselves the Solar Sisters, the students earned a spot in a national contest scheduled for mid-May in Boulder, Colorado.

But the rules for the next level are forcing them to expand the scope of their project to a mock-up of a Venezuelan village to demonstrate how solar power can help the South American country provide clean water to its people.

“It’s definitely a process,” said Anna Sheaffer, 14, of Shermans Dale. “We’re building everything here and taking it apart so that when we get out to Boulder, we can put it back together again.”

Every part of every component has to be compact enough to fit into a large tote for shipment two time zones away. Once there, the girls have to gather in a hotel room to assemble the village and its power supply. But first, they have to hope their project arrives intact, undamaged and on time.

“You can’t control everything, just head off what you can,” said Sarah Dabrowski, 14, of South Middleton Township. “But never stress too much about it. That impacts your work.”

To prepare, the Solar Sisters are taking precautions. They have snapped photos of the village to replicate it visually. They have drawn up schematics of the wiring they need to connect the solar panels to the water pump. They plan to wrap the circuit in electrical tape to keep it from unraveling. Still, anything could happen, requiring the students to react on their feet in a real-world test of resolve.

“At Penn State, our circuit did not pump the water correctly,” Sarah said. “We had to quickly figure out why.” It turned out the university caused the glitch when it positioned the light source too far away from the solar panels of all the student projects.

The plan for Colorado is to color-code the two main wires necessary to complete the circuit. The Sisters learned that lesson the hard way during the state contest when one of the wires became undone and it took them awhile to remember how the setup was supposed to work.

The move from a model home to a mock-up of a village has required the team to double the number of solar panels from six to 12. “The more panels you add, the more you have to change the entire circuit,” said Hayden Hall, 15, of North Middleton Township. “We had to start completely over.”

Part of her time Monday was spent mulling over the options on how to generate enough energy to pump the most water in a set amount of time.

“This is more challenging than other projects that we’ve done in school,” Hayden said. “I enjoy working with solar panels. It’s an area of interest for me. I’ve been looking into them a lot more. It’s a possible career path that I may want to take. It was fun to learn about something that was completely new.”

Before the state project, Hall was friends with the other girls on the team. Working so close together only improved that relationship.

“We only had a month to come up with a plan and build our structure,” Hayden said. “To go national was very shocking to all of us. I’m proud that we are able to make it this far.”

“We’ve just been working a lot after school,” said Claire Grindle, 14, of Dickinson Township. “The teachers helped us through the process.”

In January, math teacher Machele Lynch and science teacher Jay Raines attended a workshop hosted by Penn State. The university piloted the statewide Solar Challenge as an offshoot to the national KidWind Challenge that engages students to design projects that use wind power.

In the past, KidWind hosted solar energy events for students as a side challenge, Raines said, adding that this year, the decision was made to make solar its own national contest.

Following the workshop, Lynch and Raines received a starter kit from Penn State that including a water pump, solar panels and wiring. They used the kits to form a boys’ team and a girls’ team to compete in the state contest.

Participation gave the girls practice on information sharing. It was their skill at presentation that qualified them for the national competition.

“It was a good experience for them,” Raines said. “They could explain how solar power is generated and how the panels are working. The feedback they received from the judges boosted their esteem.”

The judges included physics professors and senior engineering students. The Solar Sisters also had the opportunity to interact with teenagers from other parts of Pennsylvania.

Heading to the national competition, the girls had to build on that experience to expand the scope of their project, Lynch said. “Everything that was done for states was scrapped and, essentially, they are starting all over again. They have the knowledge in their heads of what they learned, but now they have to create a different scenario.”

The result has been the village concept with twice the number of solar panels and the capacity for battery power.

The school is building a new classroom wing that would enhance what it can offer students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“It will give students a lot more opportunities to do stuff like what we’re doing,” Anna said.

For Shonali Ditz and her team at SparkShop, the biggest changes start in the classroom. "We wanted to change the way that kids are introduced to engineering," Ditz said. Since 2017, the Chicago-based education nonprofit has been working to inspire the next generation of engineers by providing fourth and fifth grade classrooms with free STEM curriculum and material kits for students.

Joseph Cress is a reporter for The Sentinel covering education and history. You can reach him at [email protected] or by calling 717-218-0022.

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