K–12 youth research platform · first cohort 2026
Gain from Rain.
Seasonal rain brings flooding, contamination, and disease—but with imagination, science, and engineering, it can become a valuable asset for us all.
Rainflower is a platform for students in grades 9–12 to explore rainfall and build real-world solutions that serve their communities.
Join us and discover your potential to turn the burden of rainfall into an asset for humanity.
The platform is 100% free to participating students researches. Everyone else volunteers their time and resource.
The method
Learn, Experiment, Analyze & Pilot
L.E.A.P. gives a student in Dhaka and a student in California a common way to work, so a single observation in one neighborhood can be compared with hundreds of others. Pick a stage to see what's open right now.
A pilot creates new questions. Those questions send you back to Learn.
Progress & rewards
Prove what you know. Collect raindrops.
Short subject quizzes sit alongside every track. They tell you and your coordinator where you're strong before you go into the field — and they pay. But quizzes are just the start — on Rainflower you earn raindrops for just about everything you do: field logs, submitted findings, reviewed work, helping teammates, and more.
Take a quiz
Rainfall, water quality, sensing, statistics, research ethics. Ten minutes each, retakeable, and marked instantly.
Earn raindrops
Raindrops land in your account for quiz scores, submitted field logs and reviewed findings. Your balance follows your work.
Spend them
Virtual and physical items in the Rainflower shop — kit parts, gear, badges. Past a set balance, a portion can be converted to cash.
The namesake pilot
One mother flower. Many child flowers. One network.
Rainflower is a smart device shaped like a water lily. It senses the first rain, opens to collect it, and tells nearby child flowers to bloom too, so a whole cluster collects in unison and reports what it caught.
It is being built in the open. Hardware, firmware and every dataset the network produces are released under the MIT license — so a student in another country can fork the design, improve it, and send it back.
Why it started
A country gets more rain than it can use — and still walks a mile for something safe to drink.
Bangladesh receives enormous rainfall every year and treats almost all of it as a hazard: flooding to survive, not a resource to capture. Meanwhile households draw drinking water from deep wells that can carry arsenic and iron, or buy it by the container.
That paradox is where Rainflower began. It is not only a Bangladeshi problem — every city and village with a rainy season and an unreliable tap has a version of it — but it is a clear place to start, and it is where the first pilot is being tested.
The project started as one device. It became a platform when it turned out the harder question wasn't how to catch rain, but how to find out what a community actually needs.
Ethan Kabir founded Rainflower as an 11th-grade student at Rocklin High School in Rocklin, California. His parents are Bangladeshi-American, and the connection to Bangladesh is where the idea took shape.
The belief behind the platform is called imagination engineering: students don't have to wait for distant institutions to solve tomorrow's problems. Local researchers, working carefully, often reach solutions that are more sustainable than the ones handed down from far away.
Founder & lead researcher · Founder profile · Team
Join Rainflower
Be part of the bloom.
Choose how you want to take part. Your coordinator gets in touch with your first assignment — you can start with a single survey and go from there.
Student researcher
K–12 · field work grades 9–12
Ask the question, collect the evidence, produce the finding. Surveys, rainfall logs, photo evidence, or building on the pilot device.
Coordinator
Teachers, engineers, MSc students
Lead a regional group, approve field activity before it begins, and review every submission that enters the record.
Advisor
Academic, technical, industry, agency
Review methods, mentor on domain questions, and test whether a finding would hold up to outside scrutiny.
For parents: every participant under 18 has a permission agreement signed by a parent or guardian. Every student belongs to a named coordinator before any data is collected, plans are approved before field work begins, and no one works alone or enters a home uninvited. Stopping work is always an acceptable decision.