Now that we have settled in and declared our BHAG, it’s time to dive into the specifics of our project. Our main goals for the day are to schedule meetings with local schools, meet with Lingnan University, and prepare for tomorrow’s presentation.

Our AlmaU faculty advisor, Ainar, is assisting us in scheduling meetings with schools. We are planning on visiting one or two schools a day to seek feedback on our quasi experimental study. Because private schools have air conditioning, we will be working with public schools. Because public schools are funded by the government, they are not as luxurious as private schools and therefore have a lower quality learning environment. Through our project, we hope that public schools will one day have an air quality index (AQI) of less than 2. 

During our meeting with Lingnan University, we would like to learn more about the air filter and its capabilities. Once we get this information, we will figure out the best way to study its effectiveness and determine if it is the right fit for our project. The initial partnership plan with Lingnan University is that they will share the information about the filter and we will test it and share the results of the study.

The initial questions that we will ask are 

• How efficient is the filter?
• What size room is it for?
• What is its lifetime?
• What is the overall cost?
• How many are we able to import? And at what cost?
• Where is the best place in the room to put the filter?
• How often does the filter need to be cleaned?
• Elaborate more on the dyson filter being utilized in your design
• Is the design open-source?
• What would a reasonable selling price be for Almaty, emphasizing low income households?

Once these questions are answered, we will find the components in local Kazak markets and compare quality/prices.

For tomorrow’s presentation, we are altering our final presentation slides to better fit our AlmaU audience and to showcase the new plans that we have made. Our audience will be full of our Lehigh peers, AlmaU faculty, students, and the SDG club. We will be presenting with our AlmaU partners who will be able to translate and answer questions when necessary. At the end of our presentation, we will seek feedback from the audience that will help us steer our project in the best direction possible.

After meeting with Hong Kong, we are feeling a bit skeptical about the filter. It seems as if they just distributed the filters without knowing anything about its effectiveness. They were unable to answer most of the questions that we had for them. The two questions that they could answer were the lifetime and cost of the filter. This meeting highlighted the weaknesses in their filter information, which we plan to contribute to in our venture. Before our quasi experimental study, we will have to conduct a study on this filter. Our partners at Hong Kong will send all of the documents that they have on the filter and we will plan our filter study accordingly.

Professor Duvanova also arrived halfway through the day. She brought components to make five more air monitors. Ainar was able to take us to the AlmaU IT department to submit a request to use the soldering equipment later in the week. She also had planned a meeting with Haileybury in which she asked permission to use the school in our study. She attended this meeting with a faculty member from AlmaU, Aurora, and Allen Wilson from Breathe Almaty.