Seven valley students head to California State Science Fair
Seven students from across the Coachella Valley will compete in the California State Science Fair in Los Angeles in May – their projects explore psychology, bacteria growth in water, the effects of sleep deprivation and more.
The students from Palm Springs Unified School District, Coachella Valley Unified School District, Desert Sands Unified School District and Sacred Heart Catholic School won gold medals at the RIMS Inland Science and Engineering Fair, which includes Riverside, Inyo, Mono and San Bernardino counties. The gold medals earned at that science fair, held April 5-7, qualified the students for the state competition, May 23-24.
Alexa Gamble, an eighth grader at Raymond Cree Middle School, investigated how effective bleach was at killing bacteria on public drinking fountains. Her project, entitled "Think Before You Drink," was inspired by an encounter she had at a local park.
"Last year I was at the park, and I saw an owner lift up his dog to get a drink from the drinking fountain. I thought this was really gross," Gamble said. "So this year I wanted to see how does time on contact affect bleach’s ability to reduce microorganisms in park drinking fountain water."
She took before and after samples of water from three drinking fountains at five local parks, leaving the bleach spray on for one minute, five minutes and 10 minutes. Gamble found when she grew bacteria cultures from the water, that the bleach was the most effective at five minutes.
The gold medal Gamble was recently awarded, came as a surprise. She thought that her interviews with the county judges went poorly, but Gamble's project won first place at county and qualified for Broadcom MASTERS, a national science fair competition for the top 10 percent of middle school projects across the country.
"I'm very proud of Alexa. She's shown amazing growth and perseverance throughout this process," said Lori Gamble, Alexa's mom and a third grade teacher at Katherine Finchy Elementary School. "I'm thankful to our district for supporting things like this. This is the epitome of Common Core – they read and they research and collect data. Everything we do in the classroom is culminated in a project like science fair."
Sergio Haro, a seventh grader at Cahuilla Desert Academy in Coachella, tested the Stroop Effect, a psychological effect that demonstrates how interference affects a person's reaction time in a task. Haro timed how long it took people to identify shapes that were labeled with matched or mismatched shape names. For example, a picture of a triangle would be labeled with the word square. His results showed that the shape labels slowed people's ability to correctly identify the shape.
"I came up with it because I really like psychology and neurology, that kind of stuff," Haro said. "Since I was little I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, playing around with the brain and stuff, looking for more answers to the engine for the human."
This was Haro's first science fair project, so qualifying for the state competition was a shock, he said.
"I was pretty nervous, but the key to pretty much impressing the judges is being confident and having passion for it," Haro said.
Cahuilla Desert Academy science fair coordinator Elizabeth Espinoza said Haro's project was even more impressive considering how few resources many students have at their disposal.
"Our schools, there's no resources around here, there's no university, there's no laboratory resources to use equipment. Our schools don't have the equipment to do a high level biology or chemical experiment. The fact that he can come up with something that doesn't hinder him in those situations and is still a high quality project is very impressive," Espinoza said. "He's an amazing student, and we're all very, very proud and very excited for him."
At Sacred Heart Catholic School, a private school in Palm Desert, three eighth grade students designed a cooling backpack for hikers called "The Coolest Cooling Apparatus." Dominic Eftekharzadeh, Lorenzo Ramos and Nicholas Tudor designed a backpack that can be used by hikers to cool their core temperature when worn or placed in a tent to cool down the tent, said science teacher Pattie Dickinson.
"They've been working on it around the clock for months. It was a pretty laborious project," Dickinson said. "They got a 4-degree temperature drop with their original prototype."
Dickinson said the students began working on the project in November and have gone through several prototypes and modifications.
"Both Lorenzo and Nicholas are on our academic decathlon team. They're exceptional students. They're all on honor roll. Dominic is very inventive and creative. He's the what-if ideas guy," Dickinson said. "It's a nice showing of what our students are capable of doing."
In Desert Sands Unified School District, Madison Risk, a student at Shadow Hills High School, will be going to state for her project "Lights Out: The Effects of Chronic Sleep Deprivation," and Joshua Risk, a student at Desert Ridge Academy, will be going to state for his project "Regeneration of Planaria Flatworks."
Kristen Hwang is the education reporter for The Desert Sun. Reach her at firstname.lastname@example.org, at 760-668-2910 or follow her on Twitter @khwangreports.