Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rejected Hollywood's portrayal of him in The Social Network but the film inspired a Gauteng teenager to design a tank to save water.
Atteridgeville, Pretoria, matriculant Moses Mhlwana was the toast of the World Water Day Summit and Expo in Durban recently.
He won R15,000 for his innovative smart tank in the Hack4Water competition.
Hack4Water is a nationwide campaign looking for innovative solutions to alleviating water shortages.
It is run by the Water and Sanitation Department and the Open Government Partnership SA.
Mhlwana, a Grade 12 pupil at Bokgoni Technical Secondary School, and three friends created a prototype of a smart tank that saves water by enabling users to digitally select the quantity of water they need.
It then dispenses the exact measure required.
Water does not get wasted because the tank is connected to containers that collect spilt water .
The tank has sensors that detect the amount of moisture in soil. When the soil is dry, the tank automatically releases the optimum amount of water.
It can be used anywhere by anyone, but farmers and villages with water shortages are expected to be the main customers.
The tank has a touch screen on which settings can be selected for how much water is needed and a sensor detects how much water is left.
Mhlwana said he and a friend were watching The Social Networkand became interested in information technology.
"We went for some IT lessons. One of my other friends joined us and told us that he had visited a village in Mpumalanga that was struggling to get water.
"The villagers had to wait for a truck to deliver water."
He said that was when they started thinking about solutions.
Mhlwana said that although they had not built a complete tank system they had created a prototype and shown it to farmers who were excited by the idea.
"They promised that if we built it they would buy it," the Pretoria pupil said.
The pupils, who came up with the idea last year, plan to use their winnings to buy more components for their award-winning smart tank.
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