Fionna Truong had the perfect 15th birthday party planned, pandemic or not. Two of her best pals, Ella Kelso and Emily Yates, were meeting at her house, at a socially appropriate distance, to kayak 17 kilometres (round trip) to The Green Store on Trout Lake on the outskirts of North Bay, Ont., for afternoon ice creams followed by a mess of hotdogs for dinner, and s’mores for dessert.
“With COVID-19, it is not that exciting of a birthday,” Fionna said, about an hour before pushing away from shore, leaving her caller to wonder what could possibly be more exciting. “My family is pretty big on kayaking and canoeing. We have been all over the place.”
We are just this little robotics team in North Bay
The three friends had much to discuss, including what flavour of ice cream to order, and what to do next with the UV Cube, a do-it-yourself sterilizer, about the size of a small oven, made from materials found at the local hardware store. Using high-intensity ultraviolet light, the cube can sterilize everything from medical masks to mobile phones to shoes.
The kayakers, along with another chum from school, Tessa Summers, are all members of Ice Cubed, a competitive robotics team consisting of kids from across North Bay. Pre-pandemic, Ice Cubed built robots capable of doing all sorts of cool stuff, like shooting baskets, and competed against other robotics teams at weekend tournaments province-wide. The squad was en route to Ottawa to kick-off its 2020 season just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was announcing his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, had tested positive for COVID-19. The competition was cancelled. The bus turned back.
“It was incredibly disappointing,” Fionna says. “Our team had been working on its robot for three months.”
Canada was closing shop, as the nasty virus, once so far away, arrived on our doorstep, triggering a radical shift in how people worked, played, partied — and built robots. Teenage girls with things to do were suddenly teens at home with not enough to do, a situation Fionna’s father, Dr. James Truong, an emergency room physician at North Bay Regional Health Centre, diagnosed early.
Truong’s hospital was short on PPEs. Doctors were bagging masks and putting them aside for a week as a sterilization method. There had to be a better way. What if Fionna and her friends made a sterilizer? Says Fionna: “My dad is always thinking up crazy ideas.”
Only this idea wasn’t so crazy, after all. Backed by the professional engineering chops of a couple other Dads — Bryan Kelso and Paul Summers — the girls got to work. Sewing, taping, writing suppliers sweet, from-the-heart pleas, to request materials in short supply (because who can turn down a kid?), testing the reflectivity of different fabrics and being totally grossed out by bacteria grown in petri-dishes from swabs off the Kelso’s home phone. But fear not: the homemade sterilizer could zap the bacteria dead in five minutes flat. The hospital started using the prototype. It worked, and all was well, and that was that, except it wasn’t.
On April 3, Vale S.A., the Brazilian mining giant with extensive Canadian operations, announced its COVID-19 Challenge, calling for entries to tackle the global health crisis. Challenge winners would be awarded funds from a million-dollar pot. Ice Cubed entered its UV Cube, a name that emerged for the sterilizer after several contenders — Covid Killer Cart, Germinator Terminator, Covid Stopper Cart, Ingenious Covid Eliminator — fell by the wayside. The girls proposed sending 50 UV Cubes, each costing about $400 in materials, to their fellow robotics teams across Ontario for assembly and distribution in care homes, shelters, schools; anywhere without the budget to buy an industrial grade cleaner.
The UV Cube was one of 1,858 proposals. Vale announced eleven winners May 8, a cross-section of university labs and medical device companies and, tucked among them, four robotics-keeners from Northern Ontario.
“When Vale contacted us to say that we had got the grant, we were all like, “Hey, what?” Fionna says. “We are just this little robotics team in North Bay.”
No longer: Fionna is now a veteran of twice-weekly Zoom calls, with the Kelso parents riding shotgun, with senior Vale executives in Brazil. At first she was intimidated by the big shots, although now she just thinks of them as “nice” people. With the virus running virtually unchecked in Brazil, discussions lately have centred on providing sterilizer kits, or at least the know-how to make them, to South Americans in need.
In Canada, the fiftieth cube shipped June 5, Truong’s birthday. The 15-year-old was itching to hit the water thereafter, as the afternoon ticked by. There were ice creams to get, hotdogs to eat and important matters to discuss with her paddling companions.
“Recently we have been debating whether we continue the UV Cube on as a business, because we have had multiple companies approach us asking to buy one,” Truong says. “I’m kind of so-so about it. I know this stuff takes a lot of commitment, a lot of time, but it would be great to keep helping people, so I am still thinking about it.
“If the other girls decide to go for it, I’m all in.”
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June 16, 2020 at 04:42AM
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Heroes of the pandemic: North Bay teens made a do-it-yourself sterilizer kit that can kill the COVID-19 virus - National Post
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