Students showcase ingenuity
Three top winners at Peterborough Regional Science Fair advance to national science fair
One student said she enjoyed having the opportunity to turn the tables and be able to teach something.
“It’s fun to teach other people about things you know,” said Corina Berry at Trent University during the 48th annual Peterborough Regional Science Fair on Wednesday.
Berry, a Grade 7 student at James Strath Public School, was one of 231 students between Grades 1 and 12 showcasing 169 projects at the university.
She’d made a hydro electric generator that produced energy from water being pumped into a bucket with a spinning water wheel, an axle and a motor inside it. Berry said she connected wires from the motor to a breadboard – an electric circuit builder – which she then used to power a fibre optic light.
“A lot of people on YouTube and the Internet say it’s impossible to make your own free energy at home,” Berry said. “I wanted to put that to the test.”
That wasn’t the only example of energy experiments at the science fair.
Adam Groth and Ben Stephenson, Grade 9 students at Clarington Central Secondary School, produced power using zinc and a copper rod to create a reaction in the acids within potatoes.
“We were looking into greener ways to make energy,” said Stephenson. “We had lots (of potatoes) lying around.”
Talking about eco-friendly science, Nicola Smith, a Grade 8 student at Queen Mary Public School, had tested how to clean up oil spills using simple materials.
She said that her experiment showed that human hair and wool were the two most effective materials out of nine others for cleaning oil in water at cold and room temperature.
Smith said she used vegetable oil to simulate crude oil because it’s similar and easier to acquire.
She said she got the idea from her science fair project last year when she was testing how to clean birds that were covered in oil. This year she said she wanted to “take it one step further.”
“The main purpose of this was to find a material simple enough to be used in countries that don’t have the money to support expensive alternatives,” Smith said.
Other students wanted to apply science to step up their game.
Tess Harper, a Grade 8 student at Central Senior School in Lindsay, said she wanted to do a project on the proper free throw in basketball. She had brought a miniature hoop and ball for people to practice their form.
The proper shooting form for a six-foot player – it changes with height – is having your shooting hand at a 52 degree angle and releasing the ball at an arc of 43 degrees aiming for one or two inches below the top of the backboard, said Harper.
For her experiment, she got her teacher to shoot 40 free throws without the proper form and another 40 shots using the physics, Harper said.
She said her teacher made 60 per cent of his shots not using the physics. Using the physics his shot per cent jumped from 20 to 40 per cent halfway through as he grew more familiar with it, Harper said.
“Any basketball player knows going up 20 per cent in a free throw shooting average is insanely hard to do,” said Harper.
She said her favourite part in the experiment was “laughing at my teacher when he air balled.”
The science fair was open to kids between kindergarten and Grade 12, but the youngest student there was in Grade 1 said Stephanie Rutherford, director of the fair’s organizing committee.
Students were judged throughout the day and received a number of awards with the grand prize being three trips to compete at the Canada Wide Science Fair in Regina, Sask. from May 14 to 20.
The three best of fair winners, in order, were: Adam Scott Collegiate student Frances Emery for her research on the effects of phytohormones on mushroom growth; Holy Cross Secondary School student Jacob Bowman for his research on brook trout in Harper Creek and Children’s Montessori School student Rowan Harris-Stoertz for his project What Should I Wear (to the Battle)?
Emery also qualified for last year’s national science fair where she won a silver in her division, earning a $2,000 entrance scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont.
Bowman’s research on the ecology of Harper Creek was featured in Drew Monkman’s Our Changing Seasons column in last Thursday’s Examiner.
NOTE: See the full list of winners online at www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com.