The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Three teens entered a NASA competition. Racist hackers said they didn’t deserve to win.

‘Hidden figures in the making’

By
May 3, 2018 at 2:26 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Perry Stein.

Three 17-year-old high school juniors had developed a method to purify lead-contaminated water in school drinking fountains, and it caught NASA’s attention.

Last month, the agency announced that the three students — Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner and Bria Snell — were finalists in NASA’s prestigious high school competition. They were the only all-black, female team to make it that far.

“Hidden figures in the making,” one of the teens wrote in a celebratory text message to her teammates and coaches, a reference to the 2016 movie about the true story of three African American women who worked for NASA in the 1960s.

Hackers interrupt public voting

The next stage of the science competition included public voting. The students, who attend Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., turned to social media to promote their project. Prominent black activists and organizations, including one of the leaders of the Women’s March, helped spread the word about the competition, saying that black women are underrepresented in science and that the public should help propel the Banneker students to the top of the competition.

One of Sharrieff’s tweets urging her followers to vote for the project was retweeted more than 2,000 times. And someone even set up an online fundraiser for college scholarships for the teens.

But the voting was interrupted by users on 4chan, an anonymous Internet forum where users are known to push hoaxes and spew racist and homophobic comments.

Using racial epithets, the anonymous users argued that the students’ project did not deserve to be a finalist and said that the black community was voting for the teens only because of their race. They urged people to vote against the Banneker trio, and one user offered to put the topic on an Internet thread about President Trump to garner more attention. They recommended computer programs that would hack the voting system to give a team of teenage boys a boost.

NASA steps in

The interference prompted NASA to shut down public voting earlier than expected. In a statement, the federal space agency said that “some members of the public used social media, not to encourage students . . . but to attack a particular student team based on their race and encourage others to disrupt the contest and manipulate the vote.”

NASA named eight finalists — including the Banneker group — and said it will announce the winners this month. In addition to the public voting, judges assess the projects to determine the winners, who are invited to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for two days of workshops, with the winning team receiving a $4,000 stipend to cover expenses.

Why the teens focused on water

The NASA competition called on students to find creative ways to use space technology in their everyday lives. The Banneker teens said they considered dozens of ideas but settled on a water purification system because they noticed some water fountains in their school could not be used because of potential lead contamination.

They worked at the Inclusive Innovation Incubator — a technology lab focused on diversity and entrepreneurship near Howard University — where they volunteer, and their mentor at the incubator encouraged them to compete and supervised them on weekends as they built a prototype.

The teens purchased two jars, placing meters in each to test the purity of the water. In one jar, the teens place shards of copper in the water — with the copper acting as the experimental contaminant. An electric fan spins the water while filtering floss — a type of fiber — collects contaminated particles. Once clean, the water is transferred by a straw into the second jar. The meters verify that the water is clean, and the teens said they trust their system so much, they drank the water.

The filtration system is based on NASA technology used to develop automatic pool purifiers.

“Ours actually shows you that the water you are drinking is clean,” Snell said.

Sharrieff, Snell and Skinner, who are all on the cheerleading team, said they plan to go to college and pursue careers rooted in science.

Skinner wants to be a pediatric surgeon, Sharrieff aims to be a biomedical engineer, and Snell hopes to be an anesthesiologist.

“The popular norm is sports and modeling and advertising,” Skinner said. “And for people to see our faces, and see we’re just regular girls, and we want to be scientists.”