Uranium Poisoning, The Challenge, and Augmented Reality

Celia's been asking me to read interims and send feedback to teams. It's fun. It's Challenging (haha), and that's always good. I have to figure out how to tell them how it is but diplomatically, and how to ask them hard questions without scaring them off. I also have to figure out how to get them to make it a Challenge project, and not just a research report. I wrote a while ago about asking "Could this question be answered through Google?"
This is where my current dilemma comes in. The first two she gave me would fit under this heading; they were practical problems, more than theoretical problems. Practical problems are always harder to fold up into solid questions. The first was looking to identify viruses by the rate of spread. The second was getting a robot to navigate through a field of obstacles, which is easy to make into a question, but focused more on robotics than on computational modeling.
One of the three I've currently been handed is treating Prions (mis-folded protein based diseases, like mad cow, if I'm not mistaken), using something that sounds suspiciously close to an off-shoot from String Theory. Another is looking at the Twin Towers and different sized planes, and the last is looking at Uranium poisoning in their town's wells (which is actually there, not a hypothetical situation). It's this last, about uranium poisoning, that's got me hashing it out here. The interim can be found here: Team 38.

The problem is this. It seems to me like this would be a perfect fit for an Augmented Reality problem. Even the way they describe it is nearly perfect. Unfortunately, I don't think the resources, planning, or anything else that's necessary to meld AR to SCC is in place, or ready to be called into being this late in the Challenge. Nor do I think I want to get myself in the middle of this particular mess until I have a better idea what the mess looks like.
This isn't a problem that could easily be looked up on Google. Google wouldn't be able to give you a clear, or even very useful idea of an answer. That's because it's practical qualitative research, and in a rather uncommon area. "What to do when your wells have significant levels of Uranium in them" can't be a very popular search term, and anything you might get out of it is unlikely to be based on solid facts.
Augmented Reality hasn't really proven itself to me or the wider world as a scientific tool. The situation is also complicated by the fact that it isn't exactly designed to offer Data. The data can be found externally, and you can spoon-feed it to whoever is playing through the game. That's what I thought the point was when I first saw it; spoon feeding data to people in a (theoretically) fun, interesting and interactive game format. That's not the point at all. The point is to see what sorts of solutions people come up with to problems that are more than, as they said in Costa Rica, "cut and dry". AR should be used for solving social problems that need to be understood as science problems too.
I'll show you what I mean. Take the Environmental Detectives game. It looks remarkably similar to Team 38's problem. You have a potentially harmful contamination in the ground, and you need to figure out what to do about it. However, the ideas about what to do could be very different. Team 38 has a few options they're looking at, namely installing a filtering system and drilling more/new wells.

So what to tell them. Mention this new technology/project/mess that I don't want to be involved with until I'm on decent terms with the people behind it? Especially when I don't know if they'll be able to do anything with it? No, I don't think so. That's like waving a carrot in front of their noses, not knowing if it'll be snatched out of your own hand, let alone given to them. That's cruel.
What do I tell them instead? How can I make this fit into the Challenge? It needs to be a computational model. They mentioned modeling long term health effects of radiation from uranium poisoning. I could guide them more down that road... It's a poor substitute. Or I could have them model out the effects of the various strategies they've come up with for dealing with the problem. That's a poor substitute too.
-.- I'm hoping some brilliant idea will come to me in the nap I'm about to take. I'm supposed to have these by morning, but I can't think properly when I'm groggy, so I'm taking a nap.