Girls high school sweeps the science competition

It is not often that an allgirls school sweeps a major scientific competition, but Presentation High School in Willow Glen did just that this year.

Presentation won the 2022 Outstanding School Award from the Synopsys Science & Technology Championship, the first all-girls school to do so. Not only that, one teacher and nine students also won awards, which qualified some of the students to advance to the California Science & Engineering Fair.

In the championship, held in March, Presentation competed against schools from throughout Santa Clara County.

Among the nine students were first-place winners Alexandra Mull and Arshiya Anand, who worked on reducing circuit wiring for a vehicle's 12-volt system. Mull and her father built an electric car together.

“It's fun! Dad and I both love tinkering,” Mull said.

She and Anand took the project a step further to look at the circuitry and determine if parts, specifically lights and air conditioning, could run with less wiring. “We designed our own printed circuit boards,” Mull said.

Environmental concerns motivated some Presentation students to look for solutions. Another first-place team, Danica Kubota and Jia Gill, focused on minimizing forest fires. Using artificial intelligence programs to run simulations, they arrived at ideal locations for fire breaks, strips of land without any vegetation.

“We were able to decrease the total area burned by 39% using our program,” Gill said.

Tanisha Prasad won an honorable mention as well as a letter of commendation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for her project, Living Green. She designed an app to measure a household's usage of energy and its carbon footprint.

The desire to help vulnerable populations motivated others. Using the World Health Organization's nutritional guidelines, Maanasa Ramprasad won second place for creating formulas using local ingredients for ready-to-use therapeutic food for severe malnutrition in Nigeria. Saanvi Bapat designed a medication reminder system for the elderly, for which she won the Inez M. Lechner Award.

Efficiency in the laboratory was addressed by a couple of students. Second-place winner Paulina Plater designed new optics for telescopes; her project on fluidic optics used liquid surface tension in a neutral buoyancy environment. Sangyani Sinha concentrated on how a low-cost, multitasking robot could increase the efficiency of scientific research in laboratories and received an honorable mention.

The efforts of Dr. Tracy Hughes, teacher and program director for the Math & Science Academy at Presentation, didn't go unnoticed at the science competition: She received the Horace Lucich Award for Outstanding Teacher.

“My job is to help the girls think about problems and issues they want to solve,” Hughes said. “Do they have a particular issue that they are passionate about?”

Hughes said the students met in groups and also worked from home. A lot of them gained knowledge from their extracurricular activities in the various science-related clubs at school, including Girls Who Code, Women in Computer Science, Women in STEM and the robotics team.

“These young women are poised to contribute to the fields of science and technology, thereby enriching the world,” Presentation President Holly Elkins said of the student winners.