RAINFLOWER is a locally sustainable smart device shaped like a water lily — Bangladesh's national flower. It senses the rain, opens its petals to collect it, and tells nearby child flowers to do the same. Clean water, gathered by the next generation.
In places like Bangladesh, massive rivers and heavy monsoons make water seem endless. Yet villagers walk up to a mile to hand pumps drawing from wells thousands of feet deep — water often laced with arsenic and iron. When the monsoon floods arrive, the surface water is contaminated by poor sanitation and unregulated industry. Water becomes both life and death.
Deep tube wells deliver water tainted with naturally occurring arsenic and iron — invisible, tasteless, and dangerous over time.
Floods bring more water than anyone can use — and almost none of it safe to drink. Abundance and scarcity arrive together.
Communities wait for distant institutions to act. RAINFLOWER asks: what if the next generation started solving it now?
RAINFLOWER works in both cities and villages — on a rooftop, a front yard, or a back yard.
The mother flower's sensor array detects the first rain and opens its petals to begin collecting.
It instructs nearby child flowers to bloom too, so a whole cluster collects in unison.
Rainwater flows to local storage, where it is filtered and made ready for everyday use.
Student volunteers survey, measure, and repair — building a local database of rain, weather, and water use.
RAINFLOWER is led by Ethan Kabir, an 11th-grade student at Rocklin High School with family roots in Bangladesh. The goal is simple and big at once: get K-12 students experimenting with real water-preservation research. Hands-on involvement builds awareness — and often produces solutions more innovative and more locally sustainable than those handed down from far away.
A walkthrough of the project. Ethan's slides drop in here — these are placeholders for now.
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