K I D S W H O S H I N E
MEGHAN GOYAL, 16 and NOAH WARREN, 15
BY JEANA DURST
to rear its head in March, two Altamont School
students embarked on a mission to help medical
workers by using their 3D printing skills to create
more highly protective PPE for doctors and
nurses.
Inspired by parents who work in the medical
our local, and even regional, healthcare workers—
and also their own families. Throughout the
summer, they continue to pursue their projects,
even as demand for PPE has somewhat waned.
Meghan Goyal, a rising junior, says she
knew she would not be content sitting at home
during quarantine. “I wanted to do something
to help my community,” she says. She had read
an article on 3D printing face shields. “From
there I reached out to a group called Bham
actual design of the masks,” she says. Armed
let her bring it home and donated the original
and support from her computer science teacher
headband and a chinstrap-like attachment and
used a laser cutter to cut out the shield itself.
Assembled together, these pieces can be used
as face shields for medical workers who are up
close with COVID-19 positive patients. “They
wear the N95 underneath the face masks so it’s an
extra layer of protection,” Meghan says. And the
mask can be reused after being sterilized. The 3D
she estimates. “By now we have probably printed
30 Bham Family July 2020
“I wanted to do
something to give back
to our community.”
Meghan Goyal
Meghan Goyal,
left, and Noah
Warren, used
3D printing
to create face
shields.
and distributed about 300, and they have gone to
about nine hospitals, most in Birmingham and
some in Atlanta, Tuscaloosa, and Huntsville,”
Meghan says. That’s a lot of hours logged and
medical workers protected. (She even had a
surgeon email a thank you note.)
Meanwhile her schoolmate was working on an
equally ambitious—yet different—3D printing
project. Noah Warren, a rising sophomore,
had read an article from a Stanford University
student advocating production of 3D printing
attachments to N95 masks to be used with a
store-bought snorkel (the kind you purchase
at Target to use at the beach.) The idea behind
this equipment is that the snorkel could be
removed but the rubber attachment would
hold the N95 in place. It is meant to be used in
emergency situations when there simply is no
time for a doctor or nurse to test a patient for
COVID-19. “If you don’t know if someone has
COVID-19, it can be put on in a heartbeat,”
Noah says. As a bonus, it makes good use of the
masks attachments with the same amount of
material it would take to make an N95 mask,”
Noah says. It does limit communication and
is uncomfortable, but it is highly effective in
emergency situations. Already, Noah has delivered
15 of these to his mom and her team of medical
workers at UAB Highlands Hospital. The entire
cost of one of these adapted snorkels is about
$90. Because there’s so much we don’t know
about how COVID will manifest in the future,
this seems like a great investment. One thing is
for sure, no matter what the future holds, these
dedicated innovators can always be proud of their
contributions this year.