Lake Nokomis, located in Southwest Minneapolis and senior Josh Holloway’s local lake, often closes its beaches in the summer due to the harmful effects of its blue-green algae. For Holloway, the lake’s shutdowns served as an inspiration for his project in the Advanced Projects Engineering class: “[The algae] was very apparent in my life,” he said, “So I wanted to try and fix that.”

The project, which Holloway describes as a “water roomba,” is centered around two solar-powered motors that act as agitation inductors to chop up algae at the surface, which is cleaned up by an attached net.

The most significant difficulty in construction for Holloway was figuring out the energy sourcing. With three different forms of energy in the same project, conversion between the types was critical: “[The hardest part] was learning how to convert solar energy into a lead battery into power for the motors,” Holloway said.

In addition to the energy conversion, there were a lot of general engineering kinks to be sorted out due to the complexity of the project wiring: “It took me a while because I had to learn a lot of new connections,” he said, “[And] cut up a lot of wires and then reconnect [them] through different connections [and] create my own switches and connect a remote,” Holloway said. Still, it is a “pretty simple design,” according to him.

Regarding navigating the challenges, Holloway’s biggest asset was researching similar projects. In his opinion, learning from previous engineer’s mistakes is the best piece of advice for navigating a project like this: “I looked up a couple ideas ahead of time that all had problems with maybe cost or their functionality, or having to be repaired very frequently,” Holloway said, “I started to base my project off of their negative parts.”

With the school year and Holloway’s time in high school coming to an end, he is done working on this project for now. In the future, though, as Holloway goes off to college, he plans to continue pursuing engineering and building off his project: “I’m going to the University of Denver, and there’s a project class I’m taking where I’ll have a capstone at the end of the year,” he said. “I may base it off something similar to this.”

Whether or not Holloway decides to pursue the idea further, the project still allowed Holloway to work on solving a personalized problem while furthering his engineering knowledge.