3 Boco students win best in show at fair

32 advance to senior, junior state championships

Broomfield High School senior Kaviya Barathi Chidambaram wanted to research microplastics and was working with a research mentor with experience with anemones.

She ended up combining the two, designing an experiment that involved feeding microplastics to anemones in tanks she kept at school to see if the plastics accumulated and would be passed on to predators.

The anemones proved trickier to work with than expected, requiring her to make five attempts and change her methods to come up with a viable experiment. She ended up using four different concentrations of microplastics, which she created using 3D filament and a food processor, in her fifth round.

“It was definitely the full experience of the scientific method and process,” she said.

Through dissections, she determined that the microplastics not only accumulated inside the anemones, but also attached to their tissue — a “depressing” result that suggests microplastics may act the same as heavy metals that end up in the fish that people eat.

Her project recently won best in show at the senior level at the annual Corden Pharma Colorado Regional Science Fair, held at Boulder’s Platt Middle School in partnership with the Boulder Valley School District.

While Chidambaram’s project also qualified for the state and international science fair, she’s not planning to continue with her project. She plans to major in environmental science, but is looking to focus on policy instead of research.

“The science fair was a really cool opportunity,” she said. “I could explore science research on my own terms and work with a researcher already in the field as a mentor.”

Altogether, 18 projects in the senior division qualified for the upcoming state competition, as did 14 junior division projects.

Two Peak to Peak Charter School students — Amrita Saini and Alexandra Flint — also qualified for the international fair in the senior division. Saini won first place in the environmental engineering category, while Flint took first in physics and astronomy.

Amrita, a junior at Peak to Peak who plans to major in environmental science or a similar field, said her project builds on one she entered in last year’s fair. Her original idea came from a trip to India, where she saw two problems: large air pollutants, such as CO2, as well as inequities in lighting access.

To solve both issues, she wanted to use bioluminescent and photosynthetic algae, reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations through photosynthesis and providing a light source with bioluminescence that’s independent of infrastructure and fossil fuels.

Last year, she tried to apply the