Guest Blog from Birch Cliff Public School

If you read our last blog post, you'll remember that IndustryBuilt is supporting a local robotics team with their challenge to improve food safety and food production. Here is a guest post by one of the team members: William Li.

My name is William Li. I go to Birch Cliff Public School and I'm part of the Birch Cliff Robotics team. The Robotics competition is made up of two parts....the programmers are the ones who programmed the robot to complete tasks in a Robot game session. Every task completed gives the team points. We do the rest. We find information about a subject needed to fix a problem related to Food production. We worked hard to find information on Salmonella poisoning and tried to create a vaccine for the poisoning. Now I realize that if you work hard, a great thing will happen...we learned a lot, especially how to get along!

We took a trip to the local Farmers Market and asked them questions about how they grew their food. They told us that no pesticides were used in the growing of the food. Some of the food that was there were vegetables, fruits, treats and more. We asked about the food distribution. They said they were grown here in Ontario.

We discovered many problems with the food. One of the big food poisons we found was Salmonella. Salmonella occurs more commonly in factory farmed eggs because of several factors. First, the hens are usually less healthy and spread disease amongst themselves, causing a higher percentage of hens laying Salmonella infected eggs.

We were sitting around and wondering. Our question was, "Can we not only treat Salmonella, but eliminate it?". That is the question we came up with . This was the hardest part of our research.

We decided to build a germ free farm that has absolutely no germs. No pesticide use would be involved. Especially, there will be no food poisoning in the food, including Salmonella. We have built a model of a futuristic city. In this futuristic city, we will have our germ free farm. We know it isn't possible to do here on earth, but maybe on another planet.
 

Hello, our names are Usman and Janith. We are also from Birch Cliff Public School, but we are on the other Robotics team.

We also looked at Salmonella, but we focused on trying to develop a vaccine for it. We put on a play about Humpty Dumpty being diagnosed with Salmonella poisoning and the doctors and scientists trying to cure him.
Their solution was to treat it with antibiotcs to attempt to liquidize it and render it harmless.