OPSPARC team members, 2018
High school students (l-r) Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner, and Bria Snell, whose water purification system won them second place in a NASA technology competition, during a tour of the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel as part of their visit to MIT, 3 August 2018.
Three high school girls whose entry in a NASA technology competition was targeted for derailment by a racist and misogynistic online forum were honored by an MIT group recently to celebrate their achievement in engineering a water-filtration system using aerospace technology.
AeroAfro, an unofficial student group within the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, sponsored a campus visit on Aug. 3 for the three girls, in recognition of their placing second in NASA’s Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (OPSPARC). The students toured the campus and presented an overview of their winning entry to an appreciative MIT audience.
"NASA student competitors honored for persistence," MIT News, 14 August 2018