Written By: Kathryn Harbauer, Staff Writer
SCIENCE FAIR: The science fair ended its county round a few weeks ago, and a few of the contenders learned information from it.
The county round for the science fair ended not too long ago, and multiple Poly High students attended it as competitors, winning as high as bronze. Many Poly students are required to do the science fair, mainly those who take Honors Chemistry, with it being a facet of the first semester in that class. Lasting from August to mid-November, students who participate in the science fair have to come up with an experiment from either a list provided by the teacher, individual online research, or a topic they may be passionate about. Then, they must experiment on the topic they’ve chosen, create a finished research paper that is complete with graphs and pictures. Certain students may be entered into a round that goes past just being graded for a project – similar to History Day – and can have their project go into the second semester as they clean it up and submit their project to be judged. They compete against other schools across the district and county alike.
One of the individual projects that was judged at the fair was that of sophomore Lucien Bar’s, who did a project on the post-nuptial flight blindness in honeybees, and won bronze. Bar found the project to be “pretty tedious, but fun at times,” due to all of the research he had to do. Even though he was unhappy about missing a day of school, he learned new information about honeybees, so he was “cool with it.” Bar learned a lot of new things, ranging from flight blindness in bees to how to create a project that was able to go through so many rounds of competition. Bar advises students who are passionate about doing the science fair next year to “go to a UCR professor and collaborate with them on the project, but make sure you don’t make the professor do all the work,” and to have a well-presented poster with a creative and flashy title.
Another project that went to the county round was that of Beckett Sullivan, Owen Weems, and Jonathan Viene, all sophomores, who competed as a group and tested how the pH of water affects plants and algae. Similar to Bar, they found the project to be tedious, with Viene stating “the set-up was tedious, [but] observing the growth was interesting,” and Weems describing that they “had fun presenting it.” Although the project was time consuming, they were glad they worked in a group together. Weems stated that “it would’ve been more boring without a group,” and Sullivan agreeing, “it would’ve been harder [without a group], because there was a lot of work.”
The science fair has been a tradition for sophomores in honors chemistry at Poly, and although many former honors chemistry students did not get to fully enjoy the experience, many of them learned things from it. Whether it be the data from how the population sees a certain cloud formation or testing the pH levels of Dr. Pepper cans, the science fair always provides a new learning experience for students.
Photo of bees mid flight, courtesy of pixabay.com