Support HICS
HICS is raising money to put a measuring station, and the lessons that use it, into 50 schools in Nepal. This page says what that plan is, what a station costs as far as we know, and how to get in touch.
The plan
- A transect, a line of sites at rising altitude from Nepalgunj on the plains up to Dolpo, each with an IESH hub and a muon detector, and a set of IESH hubs in and around the Kathmandu valley.
- 50 schools, each with a full environmental station (weather and air quality), the learning modules that use its readings, and training for the teachers who run it.
We are raising the money for this through grants.
Each station does two jobs. For its school it is a laboratory the students build on, run and learn from. Together they measure how Nepal's air and weather change with height. Nepal's public, continuously reporting air-quality network has fewer than 20 stations, all below 1,500 m; above that height there are only a few research sites. The same instrument at many heights, from the plains to 4,000 m, fills that in.
A named station at a named school
A sponsorship pays for one station at one school, starting in Dho Tarap, Dolpo, where our work is oldest. Its readings are public from the first day, under CC BY 4.0, and the designs are open, so anyone can check what was built.
A host school gets:
- A working environmental station, installed.
- Its own public data page on this site, citable by anyone.
- The onboard learning portal — 27 curriculum-aligned activities that run with no internet at all.
- A teacher orientation day.
- First-year maintenance.
We ask the school for:
- A safe mounting spot, and mains power or room for a solar panel.
- One teacher who wants to own it.
- Patience with a prototype that is still improving.
A school that cannot host an outdoor station can still run the lessons: a small offline server serves them over its own local network to the phones and laptops the school already has.
Planning estimates
Two builds share one design. EDU is the classroom unit; SCI-AIR is the sealed outdoor unit, designed to survive a monsoon and a Dolpo winter. Estimated hardware cost per unit, landed in Kathmandu:
These are worked out at USD 1 ≈ NPR 133 and cover the hardware. Transport, installation, teacher training and the first year of maintenance come on top, and the full per-school figure is being worked out. Ask us and we will send the working.
Start with a conversation
We are collecting expressions of interest, not payments. Write to us if you would like to:
- sponsor one station, or one school;
- support the transect, or the 50-school plan as a whole;
- host a station at your school;
- work with us on research in Dolpo;
- introduce us to someone who should know about this.
HICS is a Nepali private company, so a transfer to us is not a tax-deductible donation. We are looking into a US fiscal sponsor for people who need deductibility; if that matters to you, say so when you write.