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Science fair draws conclusions, winners
(by Tony Lange - December 22, 2011)
Science fair draws conclusions, winners
By TONY LANGE
How do sports drinks affect tooth decay?
Are eyewitness testimonies reliable?
Do video games increase heart rate and blood pressure for players?
Those were just a few of the questions Solon Middle School students based their experiments on throughout the semester before displaying their findings at their annual science fair earlier this month.
In all, 173 eighth-graders directed by three science teachers, Scott Kendra, Drew Kirian and Elisa McMahon, participated in the fair.
The most difficult part of the semester-long project definitely is picking a topic, Mr. Kendra said. Students get three opportunities to pick and/or modify topics, but that process can be frustrating for them, he said.
"We introduce it the first week of school," said Mr. Kendra, who has been at Solon for 20 years. "But the whole plan is they pick a topic, they do research on it, and if things don't go the way that they should go, which is the way it is in science, they can always change and modify and that's a great learning experience."
In terms of topics, there are six categories in which students can enter the fair: biology, chemistry, earth, environmental, physics and health and human behavior.
Eighth-grader Julia Joseph, a student of Mr. Kirian, explored the topic of sports drinks and tooth decay.
She collected and analyzed data on Fuze, Gatorade, Vitamin Water, Life Water and Red Bull, she said.
"Well, I'm a volleyball player, so I drink a lot of sports drinks, as I play, so I wanted to see which ones are more beneficial to my teeth and my health and stuff," she said. "My mom's cousin is an oral surgeon, so he pulls teeth. So, he gave me these teeth and I stuck them in containers that had the drinks in them and I took them out and weighed them on a digital weighing scale three times a week for six weeks."
Julia found the teeth soaking in the drinks with more sugar content lost the most weight, which meant they had the most decay, she said.
Meanwhile, Matthew Bodziak, Mrs. McMahon's student, measured the heart rates and blood pressures of different subjects while they played four different video games.
Matthew said he chose the topic because when he plays video games, he jumps up and down from the excitement.
"I don't think it stresses me out," he said. "I thought it would increase heart rate and blood pressure because of the adrenaline rush. I found that blood pressure and heart do go up when you are playing the game, but after it's done, the adrenaline runs out and the levels go back to where they started."
Clancy Thomas, also Mrs. McMahon's student, tested the reliability of eyewitness testimonies.
She walked into four different classrooms at the beginning of each period, handed the teacher something and walked out.
Two of the four teachers handed out a survey at the end of the period to their students. It asked questions about Clancy's appearance. The other two teachers handed out the survey the next day.
Of the students in the classes that filled out the survey the day of Clancy's appearance, 81 percent remembered a person walking into the classroom, while only 19 percent of the two other classes recalled seeing someone.
As the questions got more specific in terms of gender, hair color, shirt color and so on, fewer students answered correctly.
"I would go against putting a lot of the weight of an investigation on an eyewitness simply because, if a person sees something that they don't want to remember, then they won't give accurate accounts of the situation, if any," Clancy concluded in her report.
All the students were given an instruction book for writing their research papers, Mr. Kendra said.
"Basically, our goal is, we want them to learn how to conduct a valid scientific experiment by doing several trials and analyzing results, data and seeing what went wrong, what could have been done differently and how they could apply it to a real life situation," Mr. Kendra said. "That's pretty much all said ahead of time."
WINNERS
The Lenox Award Winner
for best overall project was Austin Bolomey.
Below are first-, second- and third-place winners for each of the six categories.
Biology:
Marcie Rotblatt, Mariah Jones and Teba Saleh.
Chemistry:
Maya Martinko, Tara Bhargava and Matthew Besman.
Earth:
Lauren Huang, Rebecca Zhou and Rahul Rambhalta.
Environmental:
Greg Mack, Natalie Zaba and Daniel Wang.
Physics:
Emily Gilbert, Kayla Gough and Amanda Miller.
Health and Human Behavior:
Jeffrey Yang, Mollianne Dunn and Emily Wang.
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