Underwater robotics at Fernan Lake

Matthew Moler, 11, sat at a table, welding wires to a mini motor inside a film cannister. The air smelled of burning metal and loud, industrial sounds filled the small work room. Once the motor is complete, Moler will waterproof it and attach it to the robot he made.

“We’re building underwater vehicles so we can do underwater research on how the lake’s doing,” he said, looking up from the soldering gun.

Moler is one of 12 middle school-aged kids at the Gizmo2xtreme camp this summer.

Piggybacking on projects from previous years, the group is building remote-controlled vehicles that will descend 30 to 40 feet in Fernan Lake to take water samples and gather data. The past two groups that have done the same project only had to send their vehicles 15 feet underwater.

The vehicles are made of PVC pipe and each has a different objective for what kind of data it gathers. There are eight vehicles among the 12 campers.

Some vehicles will have cameras in them to conduct water visibility tests, others will have claws that will gather samples of lake flora and others will take water samples from certain depths of the lake to be tested for oxygen and pH levels.

“We’ve been wanting to do [the Gizmo2xtreme] project for a long time,” said Barb Mueller, one of the founders of Gizmo-CDA. “I thought we would go into space first, but someone came into our shop one day and said let’s do this project going down, so we decided to do both.”

Some teachers within Kootenai County have worked with Mueller and are going to incorporate the underwater vehicle and water testing into their classrooms.

“Experts will go into the classrooms and work with the kids to ask: “What do we explore next? “What are the effects of what we found on the lake quality?” “What does that do to the vegetation and wildlife and fish in the lake?” Mueller said.

The school kids’ machines will test the waters of many large lakes in North Idaho.

“I think it’s really cool, because I’ve never really been involved in something this big before, now I am,” Moler said as he put his soldering gun away. “It’s important because if there was some sort of disease in the lake, we would want to know, we wouldn’t want people to just jump in the lake and get sick then have hundreds of sick people. We want to know that before people jump into the lake.”

Moler said what he liked most about this project was his ability to create it all himself. He said it was refreshing to be creative and build something from his own ideas instead of using a manual.

Teddy Winton, 11, also enjoyed being able to use his own ideas for his project. His vehicle isn’t box-shaped like a lot of the other vehicles. His, he said, looks more like a fighter jet. A long capsule in the center of the machine will collect lake water for testing.

His problem, he said, was figuring out how to not over-stress the motor when it has to bring that extra water to the surface.

“Today was the last day to finish building it,” he said. “Tomorrow will be using it and doing actual tests in Fernan Lake. Being able to make your own design for something that will help discover how a lake is for health, it’s very interesting.”

This kids will be using their machines to run tests at Fernan Lake this afternoon. All the data recorded from the project will be given to the Department of Environmental Quality.