This week in my Design and Engineering class, we created a water station of our own design. One thousand children in India die of diarrhea; if every child had access to a hand washing station as simple as the one above, that statistic could be cut in half. The goal was to create a washing station with materials under a cost of twenty dollars. We ran into a few problems with our prototype– as it turned out, although triangles are very stable shapes, it was not enough to support the weight of the water jug when it was only rested on a flat ground. In order for our structure to be stable, we decided, the bottoms of the PVC pipes had to be submerged in dirt.
