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A group of 8th- and 9th-grade students at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and Kushner Yeshiva High School, who volunteered to develop a desalination device for the annual Gildor Projects and Inventions competition, ended up spending a full week after school was over working out the kinks.

That's because they had placed first among the three United States contestants, and needed to finalize a few things before traveling to Israel to enter their project in the finals at the Israel Center for Excellence through Education, a school for science and performing arts in Jerusalem.

The Gildor Project offers this technical competition through its Excellence 2000 program. Each year students' inventions address a societal issue, and this year the assignment was to create a water desalination device based on green energy. Although the contest is based in Israel, it is now open to Jewish schools in the United States through the support of the Gruss Foundation's Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education.

The contest requirements were to develop a portable apparatus that could be carried by five students, with each toting no more than 25 pounds, and that produced 750 milliliters of fresh water within an hour.

Jackie Schlussel, a 9th grader from Edison, described the process. "At the beginning we were all just sitting there, wondering what are we going to do?" she said. But once they had done some research -- with one team exploring the types of green energy and the other how to take salt out of water -- they were able to narrow their options down to either a solar-powered process using distillation or a people-powered process using reverse osmosis.

Deciding that solar energy was impractical in New Jersey, they settled on reverse osmosis powered by a bicycle and got to work. Along the way specialists and parents who are engineers came in to teach them about scientific and technical issues they encountered, for example, what gear ratios would produce the best output. The regional coordinator from the Gruss Foundation, Joel Javitts, helped guide the team through the many contest rules and regulations.

The trip to Israel was short but intense. After doing a little tour and some resting on Monday, the students headed on Tuesday to the school hosting the competition, where they spent most of the day unpacking the boxes and setting up their system.

On Wednesday they visited the Ben-Gurion School in Herzliya, another school participating in the competition; the two teams presented their projects to each other and then together visited a plant that purified sewage water for use in watering plants.

As the Kushner students worked throughout the year to develop the desalination device, they had developed friendships and learned to work well as a team. Their strong relationships, mutual respect, and confidence in their expertise became important in Israel when they encountered problems with their pump, which was integral to the whole mechanism.

Everything seemed fine while they were testing the device, but two minutes after the two-and-a-half hour timer for the contest started ticking, the system stopped working.

At first they had no idea what the problem was but eventually figured out that it must be something inside the pump. When the spare pump they had brought along also failed, they decided to flush out the pump with clean water. Joey Kotzker, an 8th grader from Highland Park, said that they added a nozzle to a fire hose on the site and sprayed water through the device to clear the pump. That got the system going for seven or eight minutes. When it stopped, they flushed it again and it ran for another minute. But that was it.

Luckily they had been measuring the amount of clean water produced during these short spurts and, by extrapolating, were able to estimate that the device would have produced 7.5 liters of drinkable water in two-and-a-half hours, well beyond the 750 milliliter requirement.

Despite all the problems, the Kushner team still came in second. Schlussel explained why: "They said that even though our system broke, we didn't give up. We kept trying the whole two-and-a-half hours, and tried to figure out different solutions about how to fix it." And, of course, their system was very efficient when it was working.

Kotzker suggested that they might continue with the project next year with the idea of entering it in the Intel Science Talent Search. If so, they will need to replace the small mesh filter with a stronger one to remove larger pieces of dirt and debris before the water enters the pump.

Other local team members were Tziona Breitbart from Highland Park and Ezra Shoen and Jillian Cumsky from East Brunswick.

William Landau, the high school science department chair, went with his students to Israel and was very proud of the team. "The judges felt good about their character, integrity, and intimacy with process and product; they were glib, knew what they were talking about, and knew how to troubleshoot," he said. "For an educator, a coach, and a whip cracker, to hear that about kids sounds so good. They were so determined, so knowledgeable about what happens if this comes up, or if that comes up, and able to excitedly go after finding solutions to anything that was thrown at them."

Pattie-Jo Tripp, the 8th-grade science teacher, was amazed at what developed after she heard about the contest in a workshop last September. She and her colleagues decided to give it a try, keeping it as simple as possible, but it took off. "I was just amazed at the level of initiative they had in putting the device together and doing the research and how they started to gel as a team, where each one had their own areas of expertise," she said.

Tripp felt the project was a wholehearted success. She observed, "The amount of education, information, and learning that they acquired from this process I don't think they could get in a regular classroom situation."