Students look to make a liver with a 3-D printer, help pandas

Printing a human liver on a 3-D printer and using a robot to plant probiotic bamboo for pandas may sound futuristic, but for two groups of local students, both are goals for the future.

Two Kansas groups — a team of fifth-graders from Rosehill Elementary School in Lenexa in Shawnee Mission and a team of third-graders from Cedar Hills Elementary in Overland Park in the Blue Valley district — have received an honorable mention in the national ExploraVision competition for projects based on these ideas.

The competition, sponsored by Toshiba and the National Science Teachers Association, encourages students to find a problem and develop a scientific solution that might be possible 20 years from now.

Approximately 5,050 teams competed nationwide this year, and only 10 percent received the honorable mention designation.

Rosehill’s Laine Bartel, Nicole Gilliford, Geesha Jayasuriya and Courtney Setty, all 11 years old, decided to tackle the shortage of human livers available for transplant.

“When we looked up liver transplants, we found that there are a couple thousand people that are signed up for that and that a lot of people die from not getting a match every year,” Laine said.

The school recently got a 3-D printer, and the students started to think about how that could connect with the problem they chose. To do this, they researched both the history of liver transplants and the history of 3-D printers.

One aspect of any ExploraVision project is to identify what scientific breakthroughs or developments need to happen before the students’ ideas would be feasible.

In this case, the Rosehill students decided that they would first need to develop biological computer software similar to computer-aided design software (CAD) that would allow doctors to create blueprints of a human liver.

The girls got help understanding how transplants work from Ryan Fischer at Children’s Mercy Hospital.

They also designed a special 3-D printer that has three outputs. Two would be dedicated to cellular aggregates that make sure each cell prints in the right place, and the third would provide blood vessels suspended in hydrogel to keep the cells alive during the printing process.

“We just thought that having three arms in it would help it print faster, so we could get it to the people faster,” Geesha said.

Rosehill instructional coach Brandi Leggett said the research students did online, watching videos and just asking questions about different technologies was extensive.

“The fact that it was such a common problem (to need a liver transplant) — I thought it was a good idea,” Leggett said. “I’m definitely not an expert in these kinds of ideas, so that’s where it was great to be able to contact Dr. Fischer. … For me, it was a huge learning process.”

Cedar Hills third-graders Stella West, 8, and Sophia Scott, 9, recently learned how pandas have trouble digesting bamboo, their main food source. They came up with the Bamboo Bot, a robot that plants bamboo that has a probiotic embedded within it to aid in digestion.

“The most challenging part for them was inventing something so far in the future that we didn’t already have the technology for but also wasn’t completely impossible to invent,” said Lauren Barta, the teacher of the gifted program at Cedar Hills. “It’s a fine line. We’re thinking futuristic, but not time traveling.”

Barta had been working on robotics with her older students and said that when Stella and Sophia saw the supplies in the classroom, they got the idea to make a robot part of their project. Like the Rosehill students, they also had to thoroughly research current conditions and issues surrounding their topic.

“They get a chance to create and design things, but it is also grounded with the research and technical writing, which is difficult for students,” Barta said. “I think it really teaches them the engineering design process and the steps to writing research papers.”

This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 5:22 PM with the headline "Students look to make a liver with a 3-D printer, help pandas."