A group of recent Bloomington South graduates won a sustainability award in a national science competition hosted by Samsung.
One of the students, Ethan Kiang, pitched the project in Washington last week with two other classmates. The group will make barium sulfate paint for a mural.
Kiang read about the paint and wanted to apply it to a project.
He and six other students followed instructions and research on how to make the paint, which is so white it reflects heat to cool buildings.
"This paint is a super simple thing, right?" he said. "Everybody paints, everybody has paint on many things, and if you just use this, you can kind of help mitigate global warming, help fight climate change. And I think that was really appealing to me. And I think that's what kind of appealed to the judges."
Kiang said the paint project wasn’t intended for a competition, but they entered it after a teacher suggested it would make a good fit.
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The students will produce large amounts of the paint this summer and paint a wall at the WonderLab Museum.
Emma Shaw was another of the students who went to Washington. She worked with the City on Bloomington on where the mural should go.
Shaw credited her group’s success in the competition to its diversity.
“We have artists, we have chemistry kids. I think that there was kind of always someone who was able to do whatever needed to be done," she said. "And I think that really helped.”
Their project was one of 10 national finalists, winning the school $50,000 worth of technology. They also won the only sustainability innovation award, earning them another $50,000.
